Freak Like Me
by Santanico
Summary: What is Beauty? That's what Doctor Octopus would like to find out. And kidnapping Mary Jane Watson is only the first stage of his experiment...NEW: Chapter Eleven and Epilogue. It's all over now, Baby Blue.
1. My Baby Shot Me Down

**__**

Freak Like Me

by

****

Santanico

***

One: My Baby Shot Me Down

***

I may as well begin by confessing, as though such a confession were required, that I am not the kind of man that women dream of.

I never was. From stuttering, sweaty, awkward puberty through isolated, workaholic college years and beyond into short, pallid, pudgy, myopic adulthood, I have never been a paragon of what society has elected to call 'Beauty'. This world is not kind to what we shall charitably call the husky gentleman, particularly not after he has forty-odd years on the odometer and an unfortunate haircut; even less so after he suffers a mutilating accident, an accident which, while it has proven over the years to have its benefits, cannot claim that conventional physical attractiveness is one of them.

I tell you this because I realise there is a chance, however slight, that you may interpret my narrative as being purely the result of sour grapes. "Well, of course he would do what he did," you might say, a dismissive chill in your voice. "An ugly man like him, jealous of the beautiful people, wanting to drag everyone down to his level. Of course he would despise all things beautiful."

But what _is_ beauty, exactly?

It is in the eye of the beholder. It is in the heart of a rose. It comes from within. It illuminates and enlightens. It burns and it scalds. It is the curve of a lip, the flash of a bejewelled eye. It is glitter and flaming glamor. It is pure and untouched.

Oh, it is so many things. How could anyone, anywhere, ever hope to be all things beautiful? 

Thus, we form standards. Human standards that they tell us are attainable. Buy this product and you will be beautiful, like this model. Have your nose broken and reconstructed, and you will be beautiful, like this model. Have the fat flensed from your thighs and your stomach, and you will be beautiful, like this model.

And once you are beautiful, like this model, a whole world, a golden world, will open up before your delighted eyes. You will be charming, witty, charismatic, confident. You will be wealthy, wealthy beyond the most fevered dreams of Croesus, showered with rewards for your unparalleled looks. You will be famous, millions of people hanging on your every word, every toss of your hair, every silly, vapid laugh that slithers from your pretty throat. Most of all, you will be loved. Drawn by the sheer, almost supernatural power of your loveliness, the man or woman you have longed for, the phantom creature who dances through your daydreams to the tune of your quickening heartbeat and the thrum of the blood in your veins, this marvellous being, will be your slave for life, will have you and hold you, will never, ever leave you.

Such are the dreams of Beauty. Such are its whispered, seductive promises. 

But it would have no effect on us were it not for its snivelling, toadying little accomplice, the power behind the golden throne - the media. Constantly, unavoidably, eternally spinning its honeyed lies and veiled threats (they will depict a fat man or woman, certainly, on their television shows and in their motion pictures - but, look, Fatso never finds love, never finds happiness, just crawls home lonely at the end of the day and buries him or herself in a tub of Haagen-Dasz, and let that be a lesson to you!). They do, however, employ a secret weapon, a weapon that nobody can fail to shrink from in shame and intimidation, women disheartened and envious, men dejected and frustrated.

I speak, of course, of the women I believe I referred to earlier as "models".

And what models they are! Built to scale. Molded and dieted and exercised and vomited and starved to perfection. Pretty faces and pretty smiles and pretty, empty heads. Thin as my wrist. Blank as a slate. Lovely and curiously unhuman for that loveliness. Perfect, in other words.

All of this is off the top of my head, you realise. I'm not a sociologist. I don't make a study of such phenomena. In this, I am as amateur a student as I assume you are, merely observing, absorbing, that which is around me, forced upon me. My area of expertise lies in the sciences, which is where I found my own beauty, in the dance of atoms and the glint of artificial light on curving steel.

I was never really intrigued by the kind of beauty we are discussing until I was arrested for multiple counts of murder and terrorism.

Thanks to a certain arachnid individual (whose name we shall not mention), I found myself, after having committed certain deeds, locked away in a maximum security jail cell, with only a black-and-white television set and several unpromising-looking magazines for company. Thus I found myself immersed in our deplorable popular culture, exposed unwillingly to a crash course in social conditioning. Models surrounded me in that cell - winked flirtatiously from glossy pages, encouraged me to purchase chemically suspect creams and dyes, swayed gracefully behind my closed eyelids at night. Some men might have found pleasure in this. I found it only depressing. 

How is it that nobody else has realised the injustice, the tyranny of society's standards of beauty? How is it that nobody else appears to realise the stranglehold the conventionally beautiful hold upon our culture, our thoughts, our feelings? How is it that nobody else has gazed upon these women and realised that they need to be destroyed, that their reign of sameness must be brought to an end if we, the ugly, the undesirable, the un-beautiful, are ever to believe ourselves worthwhile? How is that nobody else in this world sees what needs to be done, and knows how to go about doing it?

How? Simple.

Nobody else in this world is Doctor Octopus.

***

Okay, MJ. Deep breath. This is doable. You can handle it just fine. Telling Peter that you didn't need him to drive you to this meeting was a _good_ thing. Proves how independent you are. Proves you're all confident and stuff. Don't need a man to lean on. You are strong, you are invincible...

You are babbling. Look, Mary Jane, just settle down. You're sitting in the most expensive restaurant in Manhattan – at seven in the morning, I might add - feeling horribly underdressed for the occasion, with approximately three cents left in your wallet after you handed most of your cash over to the cabbie who brought you here, and you're about to discuss what could very well be your breakthrough film role with the most sought-after indie director in New York, and you are going. To. Be. Fine. 

The worst that can happen is you don't get the part. Fine. Okay. You can handle that. Wouldn't be the first time.

Oh God. I think I'm going to be sick.

There isn't much time for that, though, because Timothy Hollander, said sought-after indie director, has just emerged from the Men's Room. I can't help but notice that he's sniffling rather heavily, but because I really need to stay positive right now, I'll put it down to a persistent head cold. Or an allergy. Yeah. Let's go with an allergy.

Striding across the room, he slumps down into the seat opposite me with a moan, not bothering to remove his shades. "Oh, man," he moans, rubbing his forehead. "You would not believe how wasted I was last night, uh...Mary Jane, right? Mary Jane Watson?"

Okay. Now's the chance to dazzle him with my wit and erudition. "Huh huh," I laugh moronically. "Yeah. Right. Mary Jane. MJ! To my friends," I add. Oh, fantastic. Way to go, Erudition Girl. I hurry on. "Big party last night, then?"

He squints at me. "Yeah...So, y'know, I'd rather keep this kinda short. And quiet," he adds, wincing. "Swear to God, babe, I've been hung over every night for the last, uh...What month are we in now?"

I'd really like to meet the people who give Hollander the money to make his films. They must be deeply rich or deeply insane. "July."

"July, right..."

And thus, my worst nightmare begins: the Awkward Silence. Quickly, I clear my throat, and launch right into the speech I rehearsed on Peter last night. "Now, Mr. Hollander - "

"Tim."

Tim. He wants me to call him 'Tim'! Okay. That's good. We can work with that. "Tim," I continue, flashing him the Megabuck, You-Just-Hit-The-Jackpot-Tiger smile. "I read the script my agent forwarded to me, and I have to say, I think it's just...Well, wow, is all I can think to say. It's brilliant, probably one of the best things I've ever read, certainly the best part I've ever been offered."

He perks up. Huzzah! "You think so?"

"Oh, _definitely_!" I assure him, my sincerity painful. I snap open my bag, and bring out the script, scanning it as I speak, as if to tell him that I'm trying to draw upon its unutterable brilliance for inspiration. "Definitely," I repeat. "I mean, I couldn't put it down. I stayed up all night just reading it, going through the journey with Donna, like she was someone I really _knew, _you know? I really _felt_ her. And then, when I was done, I just had to go through it again!" I laugh. Was that too much? It felt like too much.

Luckily, he doesn't seem to have noticed. Apparently too much praise for this guy can never be enough. "Aw, man. I'm just - I'm so happy you feel that way. I mean, I've wanted to work with you for ages. I know I'm kinda fuzzy on names," he apologises - he's apologising! To me! _Score!_ - "But ever since I saw you in that Revlon ad, I just had this...feel about you, y'know? Like you could be big. Super big. Julia Roberts big."

I grin, and this time it's genuine. I can't wait to tell Peter. And May. And Aunt Anna. And have the flyers printed up and distributed all over New York...

"That's so flattering that you think so. I mean, it can be hard, modelling, you know, people just look at you and think you can only do the one thing..."

"Oh, absolutely," he confirms, as if that's a hardship he has to deal with every day of his life - but shut up, MJ, no cynicism, not now that this man is your new best friend! "Sometimes pretty girls have a hard time breaking into movies, believe it or not. But you - you have something special. Something I just know you'll bring to the part of Bethany that just wasn't there on the page."

And the Oscar for Best Actress in a feature film goes t - huh? Wha? Bethany?

"Uh...Bethany?"

"Yeah," Tim continues blithely. "I mean, when I wrote Bethany, I was just thinking, 'Hey, you know, run-of-the-mill nasty cheerleader type with five lines'. Same ol' same ol', right? But you're gonna be special in this role. I can feel it, Mary Sue."

Bethany? Betha-goddamn-ny? "But, uh...Tim...I...It's just that I kind of...Well, maybe it sounds presumptuous, but I kind of saw myself more as a Donna type?"

"You? As Donna?" He throws back his head and laughs, rather harder than I feel is strictly necessary. "Ohhh, no offense, kitten, but honestly, look at you - do you really think an audience is gonna be able to buy _you_ as _Donna_? No, no - Donna's the one the audience is meant to identify with. Donna's the tragic one, the complex one, the one whom the audience will invest themselves in emotionally. I can't have her looking like some stone fox who just stepped out of last month's _Vogue_. You can understand that, right?" 

Cancel the flyers. "Yeah. Yeah, of course, yeah. I mean, it makes sense..." Bethany. Jesus Christ. I pluck up my courage. Time to make a last stand. Worked for Custer.

"But, you know, Tim, now that we bring it up, I have to ask, uhm - about Bethany - do you think it's really necessary for her to be _so_ nasty? I mean, not to criticise or anything, or tell you how to write, or - but I mean, it's just that we've seen so many nasty cheerleaders in the movies, wouldn't it be more intriguing to see a...not-so-nasty one?"

Tim lowers his shades, bristling a little at the criticism. He barks a laugh.

"You ever known a cheerleader to be not-so-nasty, honey? When I was in high school, I swear, not one of them even gave me a second glance. Just looked right through me."

"But they may not have meant anything by it," I protest feebly. "And even - even if they did, it's just, not all cheerleaders are mean like that, you know? _I_ was a cheerleader myself, and I don't think I was ever - "

He's perked up again. "Well, then, there's no problem! You'll handle the role great. All the tumbling and dancing and such. I always like an actor with relevant life experience."

And my point has flown right over his head, peppering the wall behind him. I give up. Take the scraps, MJ. "Well, I guess so. Yeah."

He claps his hands together, and leaps to his feet. "FanTAstic! We start shooting in a few weeks' time, I'll get Marie to send you the call sheet and stuff. Can't wait to see you there, Mary Ann!" He winks in what he probably thinks is a charming fashion, spins on his heel, and walks out, leaving me alone with a growing sense of disenchantment and the check. 

Sighing heavily, I take a gulp of water. Honestly. I always thought modelling would a great stepping stone to an acting career; how could looking really good possibly make things _harder_? 

Oh, well. As Peter likes to sing in the shower, 'always look on the bright side of life'. At least I've got a part in Mr. Indie King's next film. That's definitely worth something. And hey, any actress could make Donna complex - she's written that way. It takes something unique to make a bitchy cheerleader with five lines into a complicated, nuanced character. It'll be a challenge. A chance to display my creativity. To explore a character. To create her from practically the ground up. Really show what I can do.

Bethany.

Christ.

***

About an hour later, I'm sitting on a packing crate in a drafty warehouse, warmed by a solitary, forlorn-looking ray of sunlight, dressed in a black negligee, hunched over the receiver of the pay phone. I'm attempting two things that may well prove impossible: the first is blocking out the fashion shoot taking place around me – assorted cries of "This way, Anoushka! Okay, now I want sexy! Oh, come on, 'Noush, I know your sexy and that just ain't it", followed by "This is my sexy, Gerald, and quite frankly, I've never heard anyone complain"; clothing racks speeding past on squeaky metal wheels, silken clothing rustling, plastic hangers clattering together and coming apart and clattering together once more; the hair and makeup people chattering away as they put the finishing touches on a model, completely ignoring her except occasionally to chide her upon her emitting an indignant "Ow!" ("Beauty is pain, honey-kitten"); the gurgle of the water cooler, the grind of the coffee machine, the clicking of high heels, the dazzling burst of a flashbulb in the watery, grayish light. 

Ignoring all of that and focusing on my conversation is Impossible Feat Number One. Impossible Feat Number Two is getting both the attention and the interest of my darling, cherished husband, Peter. Still a little run down from this morning's non-meeting with Hollander, I'm attempting to elicit some spousal sympathy. 

Do I really need to tell you how forthcoming it is?

"…I mean, it's just such a stereotype is what it is," I say, trying to convey some of the injustice of this situation. "Why is it that every time someone makes a movie with cheerleaders in it, that somebody has to have this huge vendetta against 'The Popular Crowd' and portray them as these soul-sucking adolescent vampires who're out to get anyone who isn't a size two?"

"Well, gee, MJ," says Mr Attentive vaguely "You know, a lot of people had really bad experiences in high school and can sort of relate to that kind of stuff…"

"But not all cheerleaders are like that! The girls I hung out were really smart and nice and cool, not these toxic bitchfaces you always see - " 

"MJ," Peter interrupts "I can't help but think this is less about your imminent formation of the Cheerleader Anti-Defamation League than it is about the fact that you didn't get the lead role just because you're pretty."

"Well, yeah, that's part of it, obviously," I respond, my temper rising. "But that's just what I mean, isn't it? I didn't get the role just because of the way I look. If you've got big breasts and a little waist, people think you can't handle serious roles, that all you can play is the hero's arm candy, or Shrieking Horror Movie Victim Number Three, or - "

" – Bethany?"

"Yeah." I can hear the smile in his voice, and I know he's not taking this seriously. "Peter, look, I know you weren't popular in high school like I was, and I know it sounds all, like, 'don't hate me because I'm beautiful' or something, but it's just this keeps happening to me, over and over again. I'm never gonna get a really interesting character to play, a chance to show people what I'm capable of, as long as all they see is - "

"Uh, hold that thought, honey," he interrupts again, and God help me, I detect the sound of a TV in the background. "Peter," I demand, trying to hold on to some dignity, "You haven't by any chance been watching television this entire time, have - ?"

"MJ, I'm really sorry," he says, his voice rushed and tense now, "But I gotta go. Something big's going on. One of my 'old buddies' has slipped his chain again. We'll talk over dinner tonight, okay?"

"Peter, you know I've got the Georgiano show to do tonight, I can't - "

"Breakfast, then."

I exhale. There's no point getting riled up about this. Peter's got a job to do. This city needs saving, a lot. That's much more important than listening to the wife bitch and moan about physical stereotyping all afternoon. See it from his point of view, MJ. Sit. Stay. Good spouse.

"Yeah, sure, Peter," I say disconsolately. "Go get 'im, Tiger." 

The line goes dead. A 'good-bye' wouldn't have gone unappreciated.

I hang up, and adjust myself uncomfortably on the wooden crate. I think I've got some splinters embedded in unmentionable areas. As if there aren't enough things in my life I could legitimately call 'pains in the ass'…

"MJ!" calls Gerald, the snake-hipped English photographer this magazine I'm posing for stole from _The Face_ last month. "We're good to go over here, and we require the perfumed incandescence that is your presence to continue the day's schedule. Shake a leg, would you, darling?"

Click. Click. Flash. Click. Turn your head this way, baby. Give me sultry. Give me innocent. Give me a young girl on Christmas morning. Click. Flash. Click. I want the agony and the ecstasy, sweetheart. Give me love. Give me pain. Give me something a little wild. Flash. Flash. Flash. Click.

Lord, give _me_ something. Give me something _different_.

***

__

"…And we now cross to Angela Morgan, our on-the-spot correspondant." 

"Thanks, David. I'm here outside Riker's Island Pententiary, where a scene of carnage has taken place unlike any the infamous prison has ever seen.

At approximately two-thirty this morning, perhaps the jail's most dangerous inmate, Doctor Otto Octavius, a.k.a 'Doctor Octopus', escaped from custody, killing thirteen guards in the process. It is believed that Octavius employed a high-frequency pulse emitter concealed in one of his trademark metal 'tentacles', in order to shut down the sophisticated security systems that had been installed to prevent him from escaping. 

Octavius, a former nuclear researcher who turned to crime after the disfiguring accident that left him surgically attached to the apparatus he had formerly used to handle sensitive materials, has directly and indirectly caused the deaths of over seventy people in New York alone. Police have cautioned civilians to avoid densely populated areas, where Octavius has frequently attacked on previous occasions, and in particular to avoid being within the same vicinity as the vigilante known as Spider-Man, towards whom Octavius has a long-standing enmity.

The police are baffled, however, as to Octavius' current whereabouts, and any possible motivations he may have had for his escape…"

****

***

The rain rattles in the gutters overhead, hissing through the dark veins of pipes and sluicing across concrete, draining down the open throats of sewers. I hear it drumming, a constant war dance, on the rooftop of this house, the next house, the house after that, a choir invisible of polluted water. The skies, beyond the cracked glass of my window, are iron-gray, a silent threat.

They say you can't go home again. I thought perhaps I might not be able to. Surely, I thought, this would be the very first place the police would stake out – my childhood home in Queens. But no. When I arrived on the scene, tentacles sheathed in a black coat that swirled around me like dark wings, the rain slick against my face and my glasses, I expected to be greeted by the howl of sirens, the flash of blue and red. Nothing. The street was deserted, save for a thin, starving dog. It stood before me, the repository of my childhood memories, the rotting, eyeless husk, abandoned and alone. 

The house did not look this way as a result of neglect. On the contrary, it was purposeful. I have owned and maintained this house for the last ten years, and its exterior is decrepit in order to be deceptive: upon entering the house, I was greeted once again by all that I hold familiar: the ticking grandfather clock, the overstuffed sofa, the long wooden dining table. The carpeted staircase, leading upwards, to that room.

And below, where my family's basement once was, that elephants' graveyard where old bicycles and crates of broken toys were banished, never to be seen again – there I have organised everything I will need for this brave new venture.

On my way across the living room towards those basement stairs, I pass by a tarnished mirror. I scarcely recognise myself. I seem to have changed so much. My hair is long, black, slick as the ink produced by my namesake. I have lost some weight, but, I remind myself bitterly, not nearly enough for the culture in which I live. The failing light glimmers off the black surface of the tinted glasses that have become the eyes I present to the outside world, eyes that let the others know they will never see through to my soul.

I walk across to the dining table, where I left today's newspapers, and flick through the cheap newsprint pages of the _Bugle_ until I find my destination. A full-page, color announcement. The Alessandra Georgiano fashion show. Tonight at eight PM. The first glimpse of the new Winter collection. Exclusive Attendance - Invitation Only.

I have never been much of a believer in exclusivity. ****

***

The bed back at our apartment is a king-size. The mattress is one hundred per cent duck feather, and the sheets I use to cover it are the softest, cleanest white linen. The pillows are enormous, three times the size of my and Peter's heads, and when you lie down on it, you could almost deceive yourself into thinking you're floating. I've had some good times on that bed. 

I'm thinking about it right now because, even though it's only 7:45 in the evening, there's really nowhere else I'd rather be. Certainly, I'd rather be there than here, backstage at the Georgiano Winter Collection show. 

I just spent the last two hours being made up; while sitting in the chair did give me a chance to doze a little, I'm afraid I might have lost the use of my legs. Wincing as the pins-and-needles bite into my calves and feet, looking like a goddess from the neck up but dressed in a schlumpy bathrobe otherwise, I pick my way gingerly through the chaos that's ensuing all around me: the despairing wails of assistants trying desperately to fit models into rubber corsets, the desperate thudding of boots as makeup artists and hairdressers rush this way and that, putting the finishing touches on the girls; harried-looking wardrobe women dashing across the room, wielding coat-hangers, thousand-dollar dresses slung over their arms, pins and tape-measures clamped tightly between their teeth. Striding through it all is Alessandra Georgiano herself, five-foot-four, rumored to be fifty-seven years old but age indeterminate due to massive facelifting, squeezed into a black corset-and-feathers creation of her own design, long dyed black hair swinging down to her cinched waist, little dog Bobo tucked under one arm looking anxious, high black boots crunching ruthlessly over the confetti that litters the floor, tracked in from outside. 

Unable to resist, feeling the adrenaline beginning to course through my veins despite myself, I peek out through the curtains. 

I've seen this kind of thing a hundred times, a thousand times, but the dazzle of it all never seems to fade. It bursts into view; a million sequins glittering off the bodies of a hundred beautiful starlets, their lips bright as blood, their eyes bright as carnivores'. The press – you can always tell the press, they never dress as well – clustered around the edges of the catwalk, cameras at the ready. And the catwalk itself, stretching ahead of me, the great white strip of road that leads nowhere, shining tonight with pools of red glittering confetti, tumbling from the sky like red rain. The room is dark but you'd never know it, not with the twin kliegs that stand on either side of the stage, sweeping across the room like police searchlights; not with the brilliant footlights that line the catwalk, hot and bright as miniature suns, ready to light our paths; not with the glistening confetti that winks and sparkles every time its fall catches the illumination within its red depths.

It's a kind of Paradise. A celebration of everything that's beautiful.

I grin. So Peter's not here tonight, out and about, swinging around the skyscrapers, scouting around for his 'old buddy'; so I didn't get the role I wanted in some stupid prestigious movie. Big deal. Tonight I'm gonna go out there, and I'm gonna be a star.

A pair of clawlike fingers catch me painfully around my bare shoulders, spinning me around. It's Alessandra, a cigarette in a fancy holder sticking out of her painted mouth. She eyes me up and down. "You look_…tired!_" she says accusatively, in her lilting Italian accent. "And why is it you are not dressed?"

"Liliana said she'd be with me - " I begin.

Alessandra waves her cigarette holder impatiently. "Liliana, Liliana! Liliana is an imbecile. What is it you were to wear, child?"

"The ballgown. The organza one? I'm supposed to go on after Chloe - "

"You will go on after Sasha," Alessandra interrupts, sizing me up again. "I will have you wearing the black feathers. The organza ballgown is a better fit for Sasha. Your face – the feathers – spectacular!" She stalks off, clicking her fingers, and immediately three dressers rush over to start hauling me into the black feather ensemble. I'm pushed and pulled every which way; some nasty-looking metal hooks are brought out of one dresser's pocket to haul me into the corset.

"Oof," I groan, as the corset is pulled even tighter than it already is. I'm beginning to understand why these things were phased out after the Victorian era. One of the dressers eyes me critically.

"Been gaining a little weight, have we?" she asks, her voice slightly snappish, as she pulls the corset _even goddamn tighter._

"I, uh, don't think so," I gasp.

"How old are you?" she asks, looking me over. My face flushes scarlet. "Twenty-five."

"Oh, well, I suppose that explains it," she says, her lip curling a little. Meow. Hiss. Spit.

Yeah, only in this business could you be considered over the hill at twenty-five. Still, I'm determined not to let her get to me. After all, she's not the one who's going to awe and dazzle New York's glitterati in about five minutes' time. Just the thought of it is like a drug to me; I don't know about any of the other girls being powdered, rouged, lipsticked, pushed, pulled, tugged, corseted and glamorised this evening, but right now, I'm feeling like the most beautiful woman in the whole damn world.

I can hear Alessandra making her speech outside, her voice magnified by the mike, words like "dahlings" and "exclusive" and "fantasy" drifting through the curtains – the usual designers' spiel. And then thunderous applause, practically a palpable thing, thrumming through my body like a second bloodstream, and the music, so loud it pulses through the bones in my head – it's an old nightclubbing favorite of mine, Dead or Alive, "You Spin Me Round" – and the curtains are thrown aside as Chloe steps out onto the catwalk, shoulders thrown back, eyes narrowed against the lights, and the show's begun.

****

***

It has begun. As the annoying music I have come to associate with fashionable social events blasts out of the speakers, and I have to pause to brush some of this godforsaken glitter off the surface of my glasses, the curtain parts and one of _them_ storms out amid a burst of photographic wildfire, her vacant eyes alight, all bare tanned arms and ruby lips and purposeful, purposeless stride. Wherever does she think she is going? Only to the end, and then to turn back again, back the way she came. Lost little girls, all of them, puppets on strings.

When I first began to observe these women, I believed they were all the same. Certainly, all of them look the same, evincing only as much variation as the strict laws of Beauty will allow: they may occasionally deviate from the norm by being Asian, black, Latino; blonde, brunette or redheaded; but essentially, they are all one, their body types and facial features a hall of mirrors, endlessly repeating itself.

My initial impression, however, was slightly mistaken. There are differences, differences only evident to the subtle eye. Certain qualities. The first one, the one I will need for my prototype, must be _special. _She is to be my example. She must possess, in her one, slender body, every single quality that our society accepts as beautiful. She must be Venus incarnate. Not merely beautiful, but the _most_ beautiful. 

This first girl is not that girl, not my girl. Nor this next one, nor this one, nor this, nor any of the others. Watching, unnoticed, from my position at the back of the hall, checking the clock and realising that the show is almost over, I am about ready to give up. Clearly, the one I seek is not to be found here.

And then the curtain parts…

…And the lights explode all around me, blinding me, and the glitter falls across my face and over my shoulders as I step out, striding ferociously, a thousand feet tall, towering over all of them. The black feathers swirl around me, snaking in and out of my field of vision, and my eyes are as narrowed as those of a great cat, painted in red and black and gold, my lips sparkling in the brilliant light. I know why they call it a runway, because I feel, I really feel, that if I were to just gather some momentum, I could fly…

****

….I know this woman. Know her in my heart, in my veins, in sleepless nights of resentment and malice. This is she, the icon of Beauty, its high priestess. Her hair the red of the blood flowing through the heart's secret chambers; her eyes the green of spite, more Eris than Aphrodite. Her skin as white as snow, as the fairy tale has taught us. The glistening scarlet lips that kiss the booted foot of Society, and in return it strokes her lovely head, granting her its favor. The crowd around me loves her. They worship her. She is the one I have been waiting for.

Only she. Only she will do.

***

Midnight. The hall is quiet now. All the starlets, all their pretty arm candy, all the photographers and fashion reporters are gone. Home, presumably, to their comfy, comfy beds.

Oh, all right, I know that isn't true: they're probably all off to the Rainbow Room or somewhere to party until dawn. It's me that wants to go home and sleep. The adrenaline has finally worn off, ebbed away; after being hugged by Alessandra and assured I was "a magnificent hit", and staying back out of courtesy to have a drink of champagne with everyone, and then getting out of that corset (a four-woman job, turns out) and learning to breathe again, and showering, and getting changed, I now, really and truly, no fooling, feel about ready to hit the hay.

Chloe, the last one here besides me, her bag slung over one shoulder, waves me goodnight as she steps out through the back exit; I give a wave back, grinning, and set about collecting all my stuff into my own bag. Once that's done, with a sigh, I slump down onto one of the chairs, my gaze drifting upwards to meet my own in one of the lighted mirrors.

Alessandra was right. I do look tired, and I'm not sure it's anything to do with the fatigues of the day. I lean a little closer, examine myself in the reflective surface. I've got a touch of black around my eyes – nothing a little foundation can't conceal, but there nevertheless. I've got to admit, I'm not the dewy, fresh-faced ingenue any more. Twenty-five indeed.

I sigh, the corners of my reflection's mouth drooping down. What am I gonna do when I'm too old to model any more? I never made it big enough to have millions stashed away in the bank in preparation for that day, and nobody seems to want to cast me in a role noteworthy enough to forge a second career as an actor. Sometimes I even worry about losing my looks, even though it immediately makes me feel shallow and stupid for buying into that kind of 'Useless at Thirty' crap. Peter always says I look terrific. But Peter's hardly ever around. 

And what if, someday, I don't look terrific? Everyone gets old. Everyone's looks fade. What's Peter going to say to me when I'm not young, when I'm not beautiful, when all that glamor has vanished and all he finds himself with is a plain old lady who never achieved anything, who doesn't have any skills, who can't make her own living? What's he going to do then? What am _I_ going to do then?

Oh, hell, I don't know. I'm just tired. Crashing from the adrenaline high. Post-Catwalk Depression. I'll just go home and sleep it off.

Slinging my bag over my shoulder, I get up and start to head over to the exit. On the way, a fluttering motion catches my eye. The curtain leading out to the catwalk. I smile at the memory. I may be feeling crappy again now, but out there, I was the Queen. I owned that stage, it was all mine, those people looking up at me were all mine, and no one can take that away from me. 

Oh, what the hell. Why not?

I saunter up to the curtain, push it aside, gaze out once again over that thin white vista. All the lights are dim now, a far cry from their earlier brilliance. Most of the glitter has been swept up into a huge pile, like Fall leaves, at the foot of the catwalk. Everything is so silent now, almost hushed, like a church. Here and there, a bit of red glitter the cleaners didn't catch winks in the dark blue light.

I step out onto the stage. Down at the side, I can see the sound system, where the music guys pulled off their bit of wizardry for the evening. I step down, inspecting the track listings of the CDs they left behind, and, grinning, find something I really love, something absolutely perfect. I set it up, and leap back onto the stage, just as it starts to play.

I close my eyes as a spooky, reverberating, spectral guitar begins to play, and a ghostly, plaintive female voice echoes through the empty room. Nancy Sinatra. The only version of this song I've ever really loved.

__

I was five and he was six

We rode on horses made of sticks

He wore black and I wore white

He would always win the fight…

My mom used to love this song. Maybe that's why I do, too. And songs like this, all those Fifties and early Sixties girly songs, the Shangri-Las, the Chiffons, the Shirelles, she always used to walk around humming them. When I was little, we used to dance to them, she and I, in our tiny, sunlit living room…

__

Bang, bang – he shot me down

Bang, bang – I hit the ground

Bang, bang – that awful sound

Bang, bang – my baby shot me down…

The guitar weaves through the abandoned hall, and as it does, I slowly begin to dance. I never thought you could dance to this song, not this version of it, anyway. It's slow and it's sad, and it haunts your mind. But I dance to it. I raise my arms above my head, my eyes closed, and I allow a shiver, an undulation, to travel down my body. I wind one leg around the other, moving as slow as slow can be down that catwalk again, becoming a sinew, a snake. As the second verse begins, I start to sing along:

__

Seasons came and changed the time

When I grew up I called him mine

He would always laugh and say

'Remember when we used to play…'

My eyes fly open. Did I just hear something?

Apparently I did. A shadow moves on the wall, at the far end of the room. I peer into the gloom, and cry out over the music: "Hello?"

No answer.

"Anyone there?"

__

'Bang, bang – I shot you down

Bang, bang – you hit the ground

Bang, bang – that awful sound

Bang, bang – I used to shoot you down…'

An almighty CRASH. And I throw an arm up to my face as, without warning, the searing heat and burning brightness of a harsh spotlight is thrown down upon me, engulfing me. Lowering my arm, dazzled, I blink fiercely, trying to clear the flashing spots out of my eyes.

I almost wish I hadn't.

Towering feet in the air above me, backlit by the ferocious artificial light, supported by four gleaming metal tentacles that cage me all around, is Doctor Octopus.

Dimly, I realise that this must be the 'old buddy'.

He's changed, I can see that much. The green and orange is gone, the bowl haircut is gone. He's thinner than he used to be, paler. He's wearing a black trenchcoat, almost a cassock, that swirls around his feet, hiding them from view. His hair is long, slicked back, a shining black. The lights glitter off the surface of the tinted glasses that obscure his eyes. His face is utterly expressionless. I'd almost say he looked attractive, if I didn't know so very much better. There's nothing at all attractive about this man, on the outside or on the inside.

I stand there, a deer in headlights, staring up at him, my mouth hanging open like a stunned mullet. A horrible thought hits me – is this something to do with Peter? Has Ock figured out that he and Spider-Man - ?

Before I can ride any further on this train of thought, Ock begins to speak. 

"I wouldn't advise you to try to run, Miss. It will only make things worse."

I try to think of some witty comeback. What would Spider-Man do? But my mouth is dry, and my mind is a total blank. I don't have superpowers. Those tentacles can tear me limb from limb. 

Luckily for me, Ock likes the sound of his own voice.

"It might comfort you to learn that I have selected you for a most particular purpose. A social experiment, you might say. I don't expect you to understand, of course, but your limited intelligence surely will allow you to grasp the fact that you now have an opportunity to finally do something useful with your vain and empty existence. I suggest you take it."

'Limited intelligence'? 'Vain and empty existence'? Okay. Good one, Ock. Now I'm not scared, I'm pissed.

I fold my arms, keeping one eye trained on Ock, the other scanning the room for something I can use. "Well, golly gee, Mister Octopus-Man," I squeak, in a wide-eyed parody of bimbodom. "I ain't never been one for the book-learnin' and such, but if you say it's an ex-per-ee-ment, it must be _real _important."

"Are you making fun of me?" he demands, instantly on the defensive. Right, right. Peter told me about this. Ock's got a really fragile ego. This, plus the item I've spotted out of the corner of my eye, has possibilities.

"No, honey, this is making fun of you: love the new ensemble. Leaps and bounds ahead of the first one. You've gone from Elton John to Meat Loaf in only a few easy steps. Good for you!"

And on the count of "you", I run three long steps, grab the bottle of champagne left on the side of the stage, and haul off with all my strength, hurling it upwards, where it connects and shatters against Ock's skull. Groaning, he falls downwards, tentacles flailing wildly, holding his head in his hands. I race past him down the catwalk, staring straight at the doors ahead of me. If I can only reach them before –

Something as strong as a steel cable wraps itself around my ankle, pulling hard; I slam to the ground, my surroundings spinning. Ock is dragging me towards him, as he struggles to get to his feet; I dig my nails into the floor, shredding the paper that covers the 'walk, tearing it into white ribbons. Ock is standing now, glaring, imperious once again; as soon as I'm within range, I send a sweeping kick out with my other leg, catching him squarely in the stomach. With a muffled 'Ugh', he's down again, but the tentacle has a death grip on my leg and still pulling me closer to him, as though it's something independent of him, a lackey rather than an appendage.

We're close now, horribly close; with his human arms, he seizes me, teeth bared in an animal snarl, composure lost; he strikes me hard across the face, white light exploding behind my eyes; balling up my fist, I punch him right back, aiming for his glasses, knowing how sensitive his eyes are to light; the lenses crack, but don't break. I hit him again, struggling against his grip on my waist, around my leg. All around us, his three other tentacles continue to flail, swiping at me, missing, his vision obstructed by the blows I keep aiming, usually successfully, at his face.

Ock falls back, still holding onto me for grim death with one arm, striking at me with the other, and I fall forward on top of him. We roll over and over each other, lips bloodied, faces scratched and bruised. Our legs entangle. We're gasping and shuddering, each of us trying to catch our respective breaths before the other one does. To anyone watching, this would look obscene.

Something smacks me, hard as a telephone pole, in the back of the head, and I fall forward, more light dancing in my eyes. Ock, in one motion, hauls himself up to stand over me. "I wasn't going to hurt you!" he thunders, as his tentacles come down, rolling me over so I can look up at him, pinning me by the legs and shoulders.

"Funny," I pant. "I can't seem to regret hurting _you_." 

With a final burst of strength, I pull one leg out from under his tentacle, and slam my heel into his groin. He gasps, and falls to his knees, then onto his side, releasing me from his grip. I whip around, push myself up from the floor, and run hell for leather down the end of the catwalk – the doors are ahead of me, they're open wide, run, Mary Jane, run, run, go, go, go – 

Something catches me in the back of the leg. A slight stinging sensation. A trickle of warmth, running upwards into my body, spreading through me. I keep running. I stumble. My whole body feels warm, so warm, as though hot molasses are inching through my bloodstream. My head feels heavy, my limbs, my torso, slowing down, so heavy…

I stand there, swaying on the spot, trying to remember what I was doing. I was running. Lifting my feet. Lift feet. Won't lift. Eyelids loaded down, so much weight. Tired. Sleep. Need sleep. Need run. Feet. Tired…

At the edge of the runway, I fall. As I tumble through the air, I catch the briefest glimpse of Ock, dishevelled, still lying on his side, propped up on one elbow, watching me, a weapon I'll later recognise as a tranquiliser gun clutched in one hand. Then he spins out of my view, as my gaze is thrown up to the gilded ceiling. A burst of red all around me. For one confused moment, I mistake it for blood. Later, I'll realise it's just that pile of red glitter, the pile I have fallen into now, rising and cascading all around me as I collapse into its soft, sparkling depths. 

My eyes, less than half open, blink once, twice. 

And everything else is darkness.

__

Bang, bang – my baby shot me down.


	2. Dreamland

**_

Freak Like Me
_**by
_Santanico _

***

**__**

Two: Dreamland

***

__

Brrring, brrring. Brrring, brrring. Brrring, brrring.

"Mmnh. Hello?"

"Oh! Uh, hi. Um. Is Chloe Miles there?"

"Speaking."

"Oh. Hi, Chloe. It's Peter here. Peter Parker? Mary Jane Watson's husband? We met a few weeks ago when I came to pick her up after that thing…"

"Oh, yeah, yeah, I remember! Hi!"

"Yeah. Sorry if I woke you up, I know it's early…"

"No, no, it's nothing. Just a little hung over." Laughter. "Stayed up past my bedtime last night."

"Yeah, didn't we all…and, uh, listen, that's actually what I wanted to talk to you about, kind of. It's about MJ. She isn't there by any chance, is she?"

"No. Why?"

"Well, see, the, ah, the thing is…MJ doesn't seem to have come home last night. I mean, I was in pretty late myself, I had some work stuff to take care of, but it's not like her to not even be there at all."

"Huh. Well, the last time I saw her was when I was leaving the show last night. We said good-bye to each other, you know, nothing unusual. She was the last one to leave, though, I think. Seemed pretty tired, so I don't think she went out partying or anything…"

"…"

"Peter? Hey, look, you don't think anything's wrong, do you? I mean, I'm sure she's…okay."

"Yeah. Yeah. I'm – Maybe I'm overreacting. Like I said, I was up pretty late myself, and it is early…I'm sure it's just me being Mr. Overprotective Husband Guy."

"Aw, well, it suits you." Laughter. 

"Heh, yeah. But – look - even so, I don't suppose you could just, you know, give me a call if she contacts you any time soon?"

"Sure. MJ gave me your number, it's in my book. Uh – look, Peter, really, I'm sure she's fine. You know what us models can be like – a little flaky, sometimes."

"Ha ha. I guess – I guess so."

"Seriously, though, if she calls me, I promise I'll let you know."

"Thanks, Chloe. I appreciate it. See you 'round."

"Take care, hon."

Click.

***

When one begins an excursion into the rarefied field of scientific research, one of the very first things one learns is that every experiment has its variables. If the end result were guaranteed ahead of time, there would be no need for an experiment at all. The scientist must learn to factor in as many unforeseen occurrences as possible, and attempt to plan for them in advance.

I should have remembered that lesson. I should have anticipated such a situation as that which took place last night. When cornered, even the smallest and least intelligent of animals will lash out. 

If I had simply shot her with the tranquiliser from the shadows – if I had reached out with one of my tentacles and snatched her off that stage – if I had not alerted her to my presence and given her time to react, I would not now be sitting in front of the mirror in my mother's dimly-lit bedroom, broken and useless glasses in the waste-paper basket, a cold ice pack pressed to my blackened eye. As I shift the pack, the bruised area throbs with a dull pain; I wince, breath hissing in through my teeth, and curse myself. Over-enthusiasm. A beginner's mistake, and one that allowed my magnificent specimen not only to almost get away, but to cause me injury in the process.

It would, of course, have been the easiest thing in the world to destroy her. To simply grasp her by her fragile arms and tear her in two like tissue paper. To wrap a tentacle around her ankle and dash her brains out against the wall. But that would never do. Finding this woman was a gift, a simple gift; I couldn't have asked for a more perfect subject. She is everything everyone is supposed to want, and want to be. Her personality may be abrasive, but so what? The media, the public, the world, doesn't care about her personality, and thus, neither do I.

As such, I was forced to exercise considerable restraint during our earlier scuffle. I held back from unleashing my full force upon her. I did not wish to kill her, or cripple her, or indeed mar that perfect face or form in any way; as it is, she has sustained rather more bruising to her face than I would have liked, and her lip is split, but none of this is serious: her lip can be sutured, and bruises heal quickly. Albeit (my black eye stings once more) not quickly enough.

Setting down the ice pack and checking to see whether the swelling has gone down, I take another pair of dark glasses from the dresser drawer and slip them onto the bridge of my nose. Satisfied with my appearance – I have no wish to allow her the satisfaction of knowing she has caused me visible damage – I unfurl a tentacle across the room, over to the bed, and pluck her handbag from its resting place. I retrieved this item from where she had left it beside the stage, during her silly dance. It is never a bad idea to research one's specimen as thoroughly as one can. 

Transferring the delicate leather bag to my lap, I begin to rifle idly through its disorganised jumble of contents. Eyeliner, lipstick, mascara, the usual banal accoutrements of the hopelessly shallow. Tissues, crumpled up, stained with blotted red lipstick traces. Stray pieces of scrap paper crammed with unintelligible jottings – _Ray S. 5:30 w/r/t A.G. show_,_ P. + M. b-day cake 3 wks._, and so forth. A slim address book, which, flipped through, reveals precisely as much as the scribbled notes. Last but certainly not least, a brown suede wallet, containing surprisingly little finance but more information than everything else in the bag put together.

First and foremost, a name. Though it doesn't really matter for my purposes, I note from a handful of business cards that my subject's name is, apparently, 'Mary Jane Watson-Parker', more usually merely 'Watson'. Interesting. My mother's name was Mary. So was that of the first woman I ever loved. And now this girl. I'm sure I don't need to hazard a guess as to what the prison psychiatrist would have made of _that._

This Mary, however, the Mary of the moment, is apparently a married woman. Within the wallet's plastic sleeve is a battered photograph of herself and a young man, an undernourished- and unremarkable-looking youth with ruffled brown hair and wide brown eyes. They are kneeling together under a Christmas tree, the bright, cheap color of the lights haloing my girl's claret-hued hair, the flash of the camera strobing off the vivid green of her eyes. She has her arms thrown around the boy's neck, and the two of them are smiling into the camera, the boy looking vaguely surprised at the force of her affection. As well he might: she is clearly out of his league, and the fact that she has seen fit to bestow her affections upon him at all is surprising in and of itself. I flip the photograph over and read the inscription on the back: _Mr and Mrs Parker! Xmas 1999. _

Five years. They have, by modern standards, been together for some time now. I assume they courted for a lengthy period beforehand. Perhaps they moved in together, as I understand young people usually do nowadays. He must have worked very hard to convince her that he was the one for her – he with his gormless brown eyes and scruffy hair, certainly no knight on a white charger. He must have said all the right things, been there at all the right times, touched her in all the right ways.

And now I have her.

I stand, placing the bag and its thoroughly rifled contents upon the table. I move fluidly across the room, tentacles carrying me over the bed and across to the window, its heavy, dust-soaked curtains drawn. I pull the edge of one of them aside, gazing out over the street below. It is dawn outside; the rays of the emerging sun spill like warm honey across the broken gravel, submerging every house, every car, every front lawn and letterbox, in soft golden light. The cracks, the flaws, the ramshackle qualities of the street are illuminated, like the wrinkles on a person's face – the houses are coated in chipped and peeling paint, the cars outdated and patched together, the lawns dead, the letterboxes overlooking stacks of yellowing newspapers and twisted black garbage bags. Everything on this street is decaying.

Twitching the curtain back into its original place, submersed once more in the sickly artificial light of my mother's old bedside lamp, I turn around, my back to the covered window, and stare out through the open door on the room's opposite side. I can just see the top of the staircase. Two floors below, deep underground, my work waits for me.

I believe it is time to get started.

***

Gwen Stacy is sitting in the opposite corner of the room, sipping what looks like a cherry cola, one arm folded across her midriff, watching me calmly from behind cool blue eyes.

"Well, don't you look a mess," she says, her voice without expression.

Sunlight flashes like pale, bright fire through the window-glass as the shade snaps up, and my Mom seizes the eight-year-old me around the waist, giggling and laughing with me, as we dance around our living room to some Sixties song, "Terry", I think it's called. But the music sounds muffled, muted, as though I'm listening in from underwater. I'm staring across the expanse of the room, my mother and the shade of my childhood self waltzing clumsily, slowly, like drifting dust motes, before me, as Gwen gazes upon me, drinking, blinking. She is seated in a high-backed black chair, and she casts no shadow.

"My mother," I say, "Used to tell me that I would grow up to be the prettiest girl in the world."

"Parents are strange and unpredictable," says Gwen "And can't really protect you from anything. He killed my father, you know…"

"And I did," I continue, as though I haven't heard her. "I grew up to be the prettiest girl in the world. The whole, wide world."

"_And it's too late to tell this boy how great he was, please wait at the gate of Heaven for me_…" sings Gwen.

"Shouldn't you be outside?" I ask.

Gwen shakes her head, drinking, looking at me through slitted eyes. "I think you're confused, Sunshine. I think you've got me confused with you. I think you think you're me. Live fast, baby. Die young. Love Peter and leave a beautiful corpse for him to find…"

A smell of violets fills the room, violets and tuberoses and something rotting underneath it. My mother and the child-me have vanished. Gwen stares at me gravely, the color of her eyes fading like daylight. "You're not me, you know," she says, taking a long pull off her drink. 

"I know," I reply, desperately wanting her to understand. "I _know_."

"But you will be," she says. 

Gwen Stacy is dead.

And this is the thought that I carry back with me as I slip back into consciousness.

Something cold underneath me, cold and hard and metallic, and for one moment my mind flashes on the image of a coffin, a coffin, Gwen's coffin...But it can't be a coffin; I'm lying on my stomach. I'm stripped naked, and a tight-fitting white sheet covers my lower half. I try to pull myself up, but can't; a pair of steel bands pinion my wrists, raised to about shoulder level, to the surface of what I can see now is a shiny metal table.

Everything around me is dark; the only light is the harsh spotlight turned upon me from above, slashing into my eyes, making them water. I squeeze my eyelids shut, open them again, trying my damnedest to see something, anything, of my surroundings.

Slowly, objects drift into view. A tray beside my table, littered with sharp, menacing metal instruments that glint like wild animals' fangs in the half-light. Bottles and bottles of chemicals, labels indistinct, lined up neatly on shelves. Hypodermic syringes. A skeleton – can't tell if it's real or fake – dangling in a corner. And the only other glimmer of light in the room: the dim blue illumination emanating from a screen, in front of which about two dozen thin, glossy sheets of plastic are affixed. I squint closer, trying to make them out. They look like X-rays. X-rays of somebody's spinal column. _My_ spinal column?

I can't even shake, my bonds are so tight. I'm a frog pinned out on a dissecting table, I'm a lab animal waiting to be vivisected. Doctor Octopus. Doctor Octopus trapped me, and drugged me, and has me now. Gwen. He killed her father. He said something to me about an experiment. My spine, endless images, transparent and darkened, photo-negatives, my spine staring back at me, bathed in blue light.

He's going to kill me.

I realise this almost calmly. Doctor Octopus is going to murder me, butcher me, take me apart methodically and disinterestedly, piece by piece, as though I were a doll. I'm so numb already, with horror, with shock, that I don't even think to wonder why he would want to do this, why he would want to do this to _me_. All I can register are the horrible instruments all around me, the instruments of my destruction, and the fact that one other source of light, barely glimpsed from the corner of my eye, has emerged at the top left hand corner of the room. The squeak of hinges. The skittering sound of metal on concrete.

A black silhouette, cast starkly against the ghostly new light, insinuates its way down the steps; a broad male shadow, at the center of four writhing, distended limbs, carrying him smoothly downwards, his own feet never touching the ground.

I see Doc Ock's shadow long before I see him. His voice, cold and flat as water, cuts into my confused consciousness.

"Oh. You're awake."

"And you're observant," I snap back, a little too quickly; I'm relieved to be able to speak, to tear myself out of my own head, where Gwen Stacy and her fate wait for me. "Mind telling me what this cute little setup is all about? I mean, okay, the restraints and my being naked and everything has nicely established that you're kinky, but to be honest, all the black leather you wear had already given that much away."

A formless shape slips, effortlessly flowing, through the darkness ahead of me. "You don't honestly imagine that I would go to all this effort just for _that_, do you?"

"Probably not. Usually, if a man drugs me, strips me, and straps me to a metal table with perverse intentions in mind, he buys me dinner first." 

"You're very amusing," he says, absolutely no trace of mirth in his voice. 

"Yeah, I'm a riot. So how about letting me know what's going on here? If you can hold back the laughter long enough, I mean."

"In due time, Ms. Watson," he responds tonelessly, and I flinch at the sound of my name in his mouth "The purpose of my endeavor will become apparent even to you. I don't expect you to understand all the procedures I intend to implement, nor am I cruel enough to allow you to remain conscious throughout all of them."

Okay, _that_ can't be good. "Come on, Ockie. Try me. I'm sure if you speak real slowly and don't use too many big words, I'll be able to get the gist of it."

Ock – whose pale face can now be made out in the dim light, his dark glasses like black holes from which no light escapes – looks up from whatever it is he's fiddling with over by one of the tables. "You're terrified, Ms. Watson," he states – not asks, but states. "And I find it almost touching that you would try to alleviate your anxiety by asking me such questions, in such an impertinent manner. After all, you are basically enquiring – or so you believe – as to how I wish to kill you. Correct, Ms. Watson?"  
My heart, pressed underneath my body, begins to slam against my breastbone; I've got this awful feeling that at any moment it might actually begin to rattle through the metal table. "My God, it's like you've seen right through me. You sure you're not a psychiatrist?"

"Always the quip." Ock steps forward, into the light, his tentacles slithering quietly behind him, until he stands by my side, just out of my sight. "Always the cheap joke. You think that if you continue to engage me with such prattle, I will begin to see you as some sort of equal, as a creature with a mind of her own. You think it will disguise your fear, that it will convince me how strong you are. In fact, Ms. Watson, it does precisely the opposite. All it does is confirm what a weak and lost child you really are. You have no identity save that which society has given you. You have no personality besides a facile collection of comebacks and semi-witty _bon mots _you have received second-hand from somebody else. You are a painted puppet, Ms. Watson, your head only marginally less empty than your heart. You do not know what you truly think or feel or want because your form, your splendid –" I think I hear a sneer at this " – physical form, has cast you in a role you never asked for, one that constitutes the only image other people see of you, and you feel compelled to follow that role to the letter.

"If, however, you were somehow freed of this constraint, this ideal of perfection which you simultaneously embody and are enslaved to – if your beauty, in other words, your flawless beauty, were…changed in some way, reshaped, refashioned, into something entirely different – then, perhaps, you would find a way to discover who and what it is that you really are. You could begin listening to the beat of your own heart, not the quickening heartbeats of those who lust after you, who become excited at the prospect of buying and selling you. You are a stupid, vain, empty creature, Ms. Watson. But it is not your fault that you are. And I am offering you the chance not to be.

"If nothing else, think of the wider social implications. You do not realise it, Ms. Watson, but you are a symbol, a figurehead, of everything this society asks. You are young, you are white, you are tall and thin. You are a model. Therefore, you are 'beautiful'. This perception of you cages not only you yourself, but the entire population, few of whom can ever hope to live up to the impossible standards exemplified by you. However, if you were to undergo some alterations - " I really, _really_ don't like where I think this is going "- Both to your physical form and your way of thinking; if you were to change your body and open up your mind – then they would see things differently, also. They would see that, if such a goddess as you are perceived to be could be brought so low, and not only that, but that she was liberated by that experience – then there would be hope for them all. Ms. Watson," he bends at the waist, arms folded smoothly behind his back, gazing into my eyes from behind those impenetrable lenses, strands of black hair falling across his face, his expression deadly serious, "I am proposing that, together, you and I will change the entire definition, the entire _meaning_, of what it is to be beautiful. I am proposing that we change Society. I am proposing that we change the world."

A long silence ensues after this impassioned speech. Finally, I believe I've come up with an appropriate response:

"You really are a complete and utter fruit loop, aren't you?"

It sounds like a joke. I intended it to be. But it isn't. My voice breaks, and it comes out of my mouth in a hoarse whisper. He is insane, he is really, really insane, and he's going to do something awful to me, just to prove some stupid point that exists only in his own mind, and there isn't anything I can do to stop him. I want Peter. God, I want Peter…

No. Peter's _not_ _here_. He might get here, eventually, but by then it might be too late. I've got to be strong. I've got to fight my corner as much as I can. The words _postpone the inevitable_ flash into my mind, but I roughly push them aside.

Ock has straightened up, pushed his glasses up the ridge of his nose with a dignified air. "As I said, I do not expect you to understand."

"No, you know what? I think I do understand. I think I understand perfectly. I understand that you, you arrogant son of a bitch, don't know even half – even one-third – as much about me as you seem to think you do. You talk about how horrible physical stereotyping is? What a goddamn joke. You took one look at me, and instantly decided that I was some airheaded little bimbazoid just because I'm a _model_. What makes you think I don't look the way I do because I _like_ looking the way I do? What gives you the right to make value judgements on me, to decide that I'm some kind of brainwashed slave to the culture, just because of what I do for a _living?_ Who the _hell _are you, anyway, to tell anybody what they should and shouldn't look like, or want to look like?

"You think you're some kind of – of – of _moral crusader_ here, but you're not. You're just some guy with a huge chip on his shoulder because he had an accident that deformed him - " He flinches, and I push it further " - That made him into a _freak_, and who's bitter because nobody thinks he's hot. And you have the gall to look me in the eye and tell me I'm stupid, shallow and just plain _wrong_, because of the way I look? It's pathetic. You're no better than the people you hate – you're no better than, than, than _Tim Hollander_, or that goddamn _dresser _–" By the way, I'm fully aware that I'm ranting insensibly at this point, but I really don't think I can stop myself; I'm all words, tumbling, tumbling over myself " – Or any of the other hundreds of thousands of ignorant bastards who just look at me and think 'Oh, big tits, long legs, must be a moron'. I get that crap all the _time_, pal, all the goddamn _time_, and if you think you're unique in – "

And I stop, stop absolutely dead, because I realise I've just managed to prove at least one of his points. The fact that he's allowed me to rave on for this long, watching me calmly with an expression of mild curiosity on his face, only proves as much.

Finally, he speaks, and it's as if I haven't even said anything at all. "I have some more tests I need to run," he says, voice devoid of emotion once again, as he unfolds his arms from behind his back; the light catches and dances off a long, thin, wickedly sharp needle, on the end of a metal syringe. He taps it, pushes some air bubbles out with the plunger. "You don't need to remain conscious for them; in fact, I consider it best that you don't. You see, though _you_ may think me a sadist, the truth is that I have no wish to inflict any more pain upon you than is absolutely necessary."

He moves out of my view again, and before I can respond with even the "No!" that edges the tip of my tongue, I feel a sharp sting, like a pinch, in the back of my thigh. 

This time, I don't even have time to think before I go under.

***

__

Brrring, brrring. Brrring, brrring. Brrring, brrring.

"Hi! This is Gerald Cordover speaking…"

"Hey, Gerald, it's P - "

"I'm currently off somewhere doing something fabulously glamorous. So leave a message after the annoying beepy sound."

"Oh."

Beeeep.

"Hello, Gerald, it's Peter Parker here, Mary Jane Watson's husband? I'm just calling because - "

"Hello? Hello?"

"Oh! Hi! I didn't think you were in –"

"Nah, nah, I just screen all my calls before I pick up. Never know when an Alessandra Georgiano is phoning to cuss you out for making her clothes look bad in a spread."

"Ha ha. Yeah. Uh, listen, Gerald, the reason I'm actually calling is that, well, my wife, Mary Jane, she didn't get in last night. And now it's almost noon, and to tell you the truth I'm, uh, I'm getting a little worried. She usually doesn't stay out that late, at least not without checking in…"

"Oh. Sorry, Pete, I haven't seen her since yesterday morning."

"Oh." Silence. "Well, really, I'm just calling around to see if she maybe slept over at any of her friends' houses, or went to some industry thing I don't know about. She's probably just…I, I dunno."

"Hmnh. Well, if you're really worried, maybe you could contact Missing Persons or something?"

"Nah, it's too early. She has to have been missing for a while before…And anyway, I'd really rather not have to do that, you know?"

"Yeah, mate, I know. Look, I have to get going to a shoot in a sec, but if MJ gets in touch with me, I'll give you a call back."

"Yeah. Thanks, Gerald."

"No problem. See you."

Click.

"Dammit, MJ. Where are _you?"_

****

***

The truth is, of course, that I didn't really need to put her under quite so immediately. 

The tests I spoke of are mere diagnostic procedures – nothing painful, certainly nothing traumatic. Really, all I need to do before I begin in earnest is process a few more X-rays and scans.

Really, I did it because I needed some time to think.

She will be unconscious for at least eight hours. I sit at one of the tables, one arm propped on the countertop, my head resting against my fist, silently watching her. It seems unlikely, almost impossible, that a creature, who, in repose, could look so glacially lovely, so storybook-perfect (even the bruises look like little more than purple roses against those alabaster cheeks), would have such a gaping emptiness at her core, would be hollow as the reeds whose slenderness her body imitates. And yet, even despite my knowledge of her shallowness, her fundamental lack of honesty in her dealings with herself and others, her words still contain the power to disturb me.

Much of it was defensive nonsense, of course. She still does not comprehend the experiment in its entirety; naturally, she does not yet see the sense, the perfect, logical sense it makes, nor the powerful point that it will make once it is carried out.

I am right. I know I am right. 

But I also know that I remember.

Remember how it felt when I awoke, after days in darkness, thinking, dreaming, being nothing. Remember what it was like to find out, that these arms, these tentacles, were never again to be something separate from me. Remember the agony of knowing now that I was destined to not merely be unattractive, but freakish – a medical oddity, a mote in the eye of God.

They don't know. The others. They write about me, and they recite the rote facts – _Doctor Otto Octavius suffered a deforming accident that left him with four metal tentacles attached to his spine_. They don't know how it feels to have your body, that thing you take for granted, that vessel that takes you from place to place, that serves as a house for your mind and obeys its every order – to have it become something alien to you. Something cold and hard to the touch, something that you no longer trust. That sense of being brought low, of being degraded from human status to something unnameable, something no one can seek to understand. That knowledge of how helpless you are.

How helpless.

Does Mary Jane Watson deserve to know that helplessness, too, simply because I chose her for such a purpose? Does she deserve to know, for the crime of being a model, of being in collusion with those who simultaneously exploit her as a person and exalt her as a symbol, how it feels to have even less control over what happens to her body than she does now? Does anyone deserve to know such things?

Yes.

Yes. Of course they do. They all do.

And eventually, that sense of helplessness will transform, become something else entirely. She will still be beyond help – but she will neither want nor need it. Once the initial shock and discomfort wore off for me, I transcended such unwanted emotions and became the man I am today; a man scorned by most, mocked by a few, but slave to none. My subject will learn the same way that I learned. Having a will, an identity, of one's own is not a right. It is a privilege, a hard-won privilege. 

She will learn.

Yes.

And I will teach her.

I stand, stretch all my arms, shaking off these unnecessary thoughts. This house. It always has such a strange effect on me. It destabilises me. Makes me doubt myself. Everywhere I go, I think I can hear them. In the kitchen, I hear them screaming at each other; in the back yard, I can hear him blasting me for not being enough of a man; in my old room, I can hear them moaning and gasping through the paper-thin walls.

As I said – I remember.

But not one memory I possess – not one single recollected unhappiness, not one phantom moment of weakness coming back to haunt me - will deter me from what I know I have to do. 

***

"It's all about responsibility," Gwen declares firmly. "Taking control of your own life."

We're strolling down a blinding white catwalk together, almost arm-in-arm but not quite, eating black ice cream cones. Somewhere, I can hear the roar of the ocean, but I know it's just one of Tim Hollander's sound effects, so I ignore it. 

"MJ!" Tim yells from beside the stage, waving a script in his hand. "You know the line about responsibility doesn't come until later. Tell Gwen to read it again, differently, or I'll have to cut your part entirely."

"I'm always getting the blame for things you keep doing," I note to Gwen, without rancor.

Gwen shrugs. "It's the responsibility thing again. I can't be held accountable for anything any more. It's a shame." She looks at me slyly, from the corners of her eyes. "So. What are you going to do about this? Have you decided?"

"He's giving me very little choice."

"Well, cookie, that's a go-nowhere attitude if ever I heard one. There's always a choice. It just mightn't always be one you like." She inspects her ice cream, then takes a bite out of the cone. "Somebody made mine for me. I regret that. I do."

"Maybe it would be easier," I murmur.

Gwen laughs bitterly. "That's what _he_ thinks. That's what everybody thinks. Until it happens. You have to wonder what it's really like to lose yourself…_You_," she says suddenly "Should probably pay attention to _that_."

She's talking about the noise that has appeared out of nowhere, grinding out of the darkness ahead of us, overpowering the sound of the waves. It's a shrill, whining sound, like a dentist's drill, echoing out of the void and squealing in my ears.

"What is that?" I ask.

Gwen's lips smile, but her eyes are as empty as those of a painted doll. "Destiny, I believe."

***

My eyelids flutter, bright sparks twitching behind the optic nerves. My head, my whole body, is weighted down, hot as hell in this stuffy room, cold sweat drying on my naked back, and this is like trying to see, to breathe, underwater, like gazing through a long dark tunnel at a pinhole of light. 

What I think I see is a dark, bulky shape, hunched over a table in the corner, wearing a faceplate, applying an electric drill to something I can't make out. The entire room is pitch-dark, the only light emitting from the sparks of blue fire that leap from the end of the drill as it makes metallic contact with the hidden object.

I can't focus. I'm too tired, just too tired to care. I lapse back into the abyss of sleep, and this time I don't dream any more, or if I do, I'll never remember any of it. 

***

__

Brrring, brrring. Brrring, brrring. Brrring, brrring.

"Hello?"

"Hi. Is this Gayle Watson-Byrnes?"

"No."

"I…Oh." Pause. "I'm sorry, I must have the wrong –"

"Watson-Byrnes was my married name. It's just Watson now."

"Oh! Oh, I see. I'm – I'm sorry."

"Who's speaking, please?"

"Gayle, this is Peter Parker. Your sister's husband? I don't think we've ever met…"

"Mary Jane mentioned something about a husband once, yes."

"Ah." Silence. "Well, the thing is – I was just calling to ask if maybe she was with you, or if she'd given you a call lately, because she didn't come home the other night and I haven't seen her since –"

"Mary Jane and I are not close."

"Um..."

"She only calls me on the children's birthdays and at Christmas. And she has never been in my home. So. She's gone missing, has she?"

"I…I think so. Yes. Yes, she has."

"It wouldn't surprise me. My sister has a habit of disappearing whenever things get too difficult."

"…"

"Is there anything else, Mr. Parker?"

"No. No, that's all."

"Goodbye, then."

Click.

***

****

It is done. Every last circuit is in place. The design is flawless – I test it out, balancing it on my hand, and it snaps itself harshly against the countertop at my mental command, leaving deep cracks in the wood. There is no telling how much damage it may do once it is hers. No telling how much damage _she_ may do. It will be fascinating to find out. I wonder, gazing across at her, still silent and sleeping, whether she dreams, and if those dreams are in any way influenced by what I have revealed to her. 

Even if this is not the case, I am certain my message will sink in sooner or later.

I cross the room, the item encased now in a metal strong-box. It jerks and rattles a little of its own accord, without intelligence, the way a severed limb will thrash as the nerve-endings die. 

Perhaps it simply moves because it senses my own excitement, my own thrill. I am finally, finally, about to begin. All the preliminary tests that can be run have been run. Every failsafe is in place. The instruments are sterilised. The subject is anaesthetised. My pulse is pounding in my temples, the blood tingling through my fingertips as I tie on the surgical mask, pull on the gloves, button up the white surgical scrubs. Laying the strongbox down upon the tray at the head of the table, I pick up one of the scalpels and lay it, pressed flat and still, against the soft curve of her spine.

I have very little surgical experience. This operation is infinitely, minutely delicate. There is no one I could trust to perform it but myself – and no one other than myself to blame if it goes wrong, leaves her a vegetable, leaves her a corpse.

Every experiment has its variables. 

My hand held steady, I slowly, deliberately, make the primary incision.

***

More dreams, feels like I'll never be able to sleep for real; my mind is always working, always working. Senses the danger. Spider-sense tingling, heh.

Not dreams like before. Different. Fragmented. Blood. Bright light. Shining steel. Face leaning over me, mask, black hole eyes. White gloves dripping red. Something that squirms, black, shiny, clamped between tongs. Sunset. Sunrise. A gentle numbness, floating, in water, in the ocean, in the river, Gwen, falling towards the river, I'm falling, I'm falling…

You have to wonder what it's really like to lose yourself.

__

***

"Three days. Not one call. Not one letter. Not one word, even. Aunt May, this is – I - I'm scared_, Aunt May. I'm so scared…"_

"Oh, Peter…The police are doing everything they can. They're all out looking for her. I'm sure they'll find her soon. I…She must be staying somewhere. _With her family, perhaps. Did you give her sister a call…?"_

"Aunt May, I've called everyone! Gayle hasn't seen her. Neither have any of her friends, or the people she works with. I've swung all around this city, day and night. I haven't slept a wink. But she isn't anywhere to be found. She's vanished." Silence. "And you know who else has vanished? Doctor Octopus."

"Oh, Peter. No. You can't start thinking…That's…It must be a coincidence, that's all."

"The police can't find her because someone doesn't want her to be found."

"Like you said, it's only been three days. That's early days yet. It doesn't follow that just because Mary Jane is missing…"

"NO. It's something to do with Octavius. I know_ it's something to do with Octavius! He knows something about me, he's using her to get to me - and as soon as I find him, I swear, I swear to _God_, if he's hurt her, in _any _way, I'm gonna - "_

"Peter. Please. Just…calm down. Jumping to conclusions and getting upset over them isn't going to help anyone. I think what you need to do, right now, is get some sleep."

"May, there's just no way I - "

"You look terrible. There are shadows under your eyes. And supposing…Just supposing Mary Jane is_ in trouble – how can you be of any help to her if you can't even think straight? You need to sleep."_

"I need MJ. Back here. Safe. By my side."

"And she will be, Peter. Either the police will find her, or you will."

"She went missing before, Aunt May. Remember? The last time she went missing? We all thought she was dead. It nearly destroyed her. Nearly destroyed what we have…"

"Sleep, Peter. Just sleep."

"He's got her, Aunt May. Octopus has got her, I know he has. And he could be – oh, God, he could be doing anything, he could be…"

"Shhhh. Sleep, my darling. It will all be all right. I promise. Wherever she is, Mary Jane will be all right."

****

***

And, on the fourth day, it is done.

***

I'm awake. Without preamble, without a moment of drowsiness between sleep and consciousness, I'm awake. Like turning on a light switch.

The only way I can tell that I'm awake is because I'm thinking again, aware of my body again. Everything around me is still dark. Something tight, wrapped around my head. A blindfold. It must be a blindfold.

I'm thinking again, yes, and it feels such a relief to be able to think, and control those thoughts. That is a blindfold over my eyes. That is a cold steel table underneath me. That is the sound of footsteps approaching my side.

I raise my head slightly, lick my dry lips, clear my throat. "Octopus?" I croak.

A click. A low, passionless monotone. "Subject regained consciousness at eleven-thirty PM, July seventeenth. No apparent physical ill-effects."

July seventeenth? "Three days…" I moan.

Another click. "Yes, Ms. Watson. Three days."

"Peter…"

"Your husband?" Another sneer in his voice. "I suspect he has likely contacted the police by now. But the chances that they will find you are very slim." A pause. "And even if they _did_ find you…I wonder, would they know who you were?"

I feel cold, terribly cold, and it's nothing to do with the metal table underneath me. Freezing sweat plasters the blindfold against my closed eyelids. And something else. I feel something else. Something on my back. Something in my back. Crawling, unfurling, writhing. It feels like my spine is trying to claw its way out of my body.

Panic overtakes me, and I start to struggle, really struggle, desperate to just sit up, to pull off the blindfold, to look at myself and see if I'm okay. I can't bear this – can't be tied here, trussed up like a human sacrifice on an altar, I don't care if I pull my goddamn hands off, just take off these straps, take off this blindfold, let me up, let me up, I can't breathe, let me up let me up let me up –

"I intend to." Was I speaking out loud? Oh, Jesus God… "But I must ask you to calm yourself, Ms. Watson. To cause yourself any damage at this delicate time would be disastrous. Your central nervous system still has yet to reacclimate itself to these changes. Any hysteria on your part could leave you a cripple for life. I do not want to have to sedate you, so I am instead placing my faith in your limited capacity for reason. Do not be alarmed."

I laugh, shakily, loudly. "Okay. Okay. I'm fine. I'll be good. Sit. Stay. Good spouse."

I sense a moment of confusion on Ock's part, then a mental shrug. "Be still."

And I'm still. Warmth, human warmth, on the sides of my head. The cloth in front of my eyes loosening, slipping, being pulled off. The light floods my eyes as I slowly blink them open, trying to breathe, trying to time my breaths with my heartbeat. It's not possible, because my heart is throwing itself against my ribcage like a trapped animal.

Ock stands over me, the light reflected in his shades, shining off his leather coat, his arching tentacles. He leans down, shines a small pen-light into each eye. "How do you feel?" he asks.

A bubble of hysterical laughter rises in me again, but I choke it down. "About as well as can be expected, Doc," I reply, but my voice is hoarse, dry, a whisper.

"Any nausea? Temperature fluctuations? I can't help you unless you tell me if there's anything wrong."

Is anything right?

"No. I don't – I don't feel anything. I'm – frozen. I feel frozen. Cold. I guess. I…"

I stop. I have to stop. Everything stops, the whole world stops.

Something has just appeared in front of me, between Ock and myself, right in front of my eyes, and since Ock doesn't seem to react to it, it must be an hallucination. He's given me drugs. I'm just hallucinating this.

It looks like a long, thin black whip, made of some kind of shining dark substance so malleable I can see squirming, pulsing motions beneath its surface. It tapers into a slender arrowhead, like the skull of a snake. It hovers in front of me, gently undulating, like a sea anemone, and every time it moves, I feel that coiling and uncoiling sensation in my back.

I stare at it, at its endpoint, wondering, vaguely, what it is. As if in response, the endpoint, the snake's head, snaps open with a sound like sharpening knives, opening like a flower, into five long, skinny black claws, their wickedly sharp, razor-blade points only inches away from my eyes. 

My back writhes, independent of my own muscles, of my mind's commands. And as it does, the thing in front of me writhes, too. I shift my shoulder muscles, slightly, to the right. The thing in front of me shifts, slightly, to the right. Shift to the left. It shifts to the left. I want it to close its claws. It does.

Hold still.

It holds still. Still, and attentive. Awaiting my command. 

I know.

I know what it is.

I know what he's done to me.

I stare at my tentacle.

And my tentacle.

Stares back.

At me.

***

Gwen, laughing merrily, her eyes flashing silver, reaches out and pulls the window-shade down with a _bang_, plunging the room into blackness.


	3. Party Girl, Mama's Boy

**__**

Freak Like Me

by

****

Santanico

***

Three: Party Girl, Mama's Boy

***

__

"Gooooin' to the chap-el an' we're – gon-na get ma-a-arried, goin' to the chap-el of looooove…"

Her voice, wavering, dull, broken, floats past the thick oaken door, down the stairs, and into the kitchen where I stand at the counter, the kettle beginning to boil. She has been singing that song, in a flat, repetitive, dazed drone, for hours. It must hold some kind of special meaning for her. It merely irritates me.

I brought her up from the basement approximately three or four hours ago, my tentacles gently helping her out of her restraints and into a hospital gown, she limp and unresisting. I led her up the stairs, half-carrying her, and placed her in a small room, empty but for a bare mattress on the floor, the room that was mine for twenty years. It was a strange thing, to see her there, slumped like a marionette against one of the walls I had stared at every night for the first two decades of my life; everything in that room so familiar, yet scoured of anything personal, and this woman, this alien presence, sitting, staring, not moving an inch.

I'm not worried about her, though. This is normal, if such a term can be applied to an experience that is profoundly abnormal. If I were to write a paper on this phenomenon – "Physical and Psychological Effects of Intra-Spinal Limb Attachment Surgery", perhaps – I would classify this as the 'Reflecting' phase of the adjustment. As a result of severe emotional trauma, my subject has retreated back into the safety of her memories. These memories will not necessarily be pleasant ones; indeed, for all I know, hers may be decidedly unhappy. But even sad and terrible memories are, to her, a better place in which to dwell than the present she finds so horrifying. Dissociation. Almost an out-of-body experience. 

She should consider herself lucky that I am here for her. When I went through what she is going through, there was nobody, nobody, who understood. I was a curiosity, a fascinating medical phenomenon the likes of which had never been seen before. The doctors crowded around me, scribbled feverish notes on their little pads, dreaming avaricious little dreams of how I would make their reputations, how I would make them famous. They stripped me naked, photographed me, X-rayed me, observed my brain patterns as I slept. 

They wanted to know how the connection worked. The connection between my arms and myself. They asked me endless questions, at a time when I was desperate for answers. Back then, I still felt the need for human warmth, for compassion. One night, to my everlasting embarrassment, I seized the arm of one of the interns and begged her not to leave me. Garbling my words, I tried to tell her, my tongue stumbling across each syllable, how I could feel the world slipping out of my grasp and I didn't know why; how my body was no longer a part of myself, but a suit, a suit made of flesh and bone and cold steel that I huddled inside, sobbing; how I wanted to go back, slither quietly into the undergrowth of my memories, even the bad ones, even the sad ones, and never come back out. 

A look of alarm flickered across her face, then disgust, then she forced her features into a grimace and told me they were doing what they could for me. Then she pulled her arm away.

That was when I stopped, simply stopped, and forced my mind to run backwards, like a film projector. The doctors described my state as 'catatonic', but that wasn't quite true. I was not merely staring blankly into an inner darkness; my mind was not a perfect blank. I was allowing every memory, every tiny piece of recollection I could gather from the corners of my brain, to wash over me, to bury me in an avalanche of faded image and echoed sound. I felt so much; I felt _everything_, all over again, reviewing my few past joys, revisiting my many past hurts. 

It was the pain I carried back with me when I eventually re-emerged from my mental cocoon. The pain of an entire wasted, dismal lifetime, distilled into one single and unyielding thought: everyone you have ever needed will ultimately leave you.

I move into the dining room and sit down at the table. The kettle has begun to whine. I stretch my tentacles behind me, back into the kitchen, absently remove a mug from a cabinet, place a tea-bag inside it, fill it with steaming water, and draw it to my lips. I gaze up the stairs, in the direction of the faint and tremulous singing, and sigh. 

It's going to be a long time before I can get this song out of my head.

***

My mother used to tell me that I would grow up to be the prettiest girl in the world.

She'd given up on Gayle. Gayle the gangly, Gayle the wispy-haired, Gayle the horse-faced. I was the younger child, the beloved one, the one who existed so that the sun would have someone to shine down upon. 

In our living room, the clean, white living room with the shade pulled up high enough to allow the dazzling sunlight to come cascading through, Mom would put on some music, the music she loved when she was young and beautiful and didn't have to think about anything other than clothes and dances and Saturday night. The Shangri-Las. The Chiffons. The Shirelles. The Dixie Cups, and we were dancing around the living room together, I in my nightdress, shrieking with laughter, waltzing clumsily in the sunshine as "Chapel of Love" belted out on the stereo behind us. I haven't ever laughed the way I used to laugh then, the giggles bubbling up inside and spilling out of me, delirious, delighted. My hair fell over my face, the red burnished gold in the light, as Mom held me up and dipped me down, and we sang along at the top of our voices: "_We'll love until, the end of time, and we'll nev-er be lone-ly any-moooooore…"_

The door slammed open, and Mom stopped dancing, staring, as the color drained away from her face. Dad stood there, all six feet of him framed in the doorway, his eyes bloodshot and burning. I could smell the alcohol fumes radiating off his skin, even from where I stood. Glaring, he strode across the room, and snapped off the stereo, cutting the saccharine-sweet voices dead. 

"Some of us," he stated, his voice quiet "Are trying to work."

"I know, Philip," Mom began. "It's just that Mary Jane and I –"

"Some of us," Dad continued "Are trying to find ways to support this family and keep it alive and well. Some of us –" His voice rose to a roar "- DO NOT NEED TO LISTEN TO THAT CRAP AT TOP VOLUME FIRST THING ON A SATURDAY MORNING!"

"Philip," Mom tried again, ever-so-gently pushing me behind her, "We were just having fun, that's all, before I start the chores. We didn't mean to upset y –"

"God! You have an excuse for everything, don't you, Madeleine?" my father snarled, and mimicks her voice, his own high, mocking, cruel. "'We were having _fun_'. 'We didn't mean to _upset_ you'. Well, gosh, Maddy, I wish _I_ could have fun! I wish I had the time and the boundless energy required to prance around the living room to some Sixties teen romance crap with our spoiled eight-year-old –"

"She is not spoiled!" Mom snapped, then flinched away, cowering, as Dad took a step forward.

"Really? Her grades are failing. She doesn't lift a finger around the house. All she ever does is play with her dolls and her dress-ups and spend all my money on ballet class." He gazed down at me, eyes glittering with sozzled contempt, lips pursed. I stared down at the dusty wooden floor, not knowing where else to look. "Jesus. I had a 151 IQ, you know. Everyone said I was the smartest kid in my school, at her age. Had offers to be leapfrogged ahead into the next grade. And now look what I got. I got an airheaded little kid who doesn't think about anything except her little fairy-princess fantasies. 'Least Gayle's getting okay grades; with this one, I just got a junior bimbo on my hands. That's what you get when you marry a small-town beauty queen, I guess…"

"Oh, yes, Philip, and _you _amounted to so damn much!" Mom yelled, her tether snapping. "Why don't you go back to your study and work some more on that novel? You know, the one you've been 'working on' for _ten goddamn years?! _Oh, yes, you're a regular_ Shakespeare_, is what you are. God, what right have you got to – "

Dad slapped her, hard, across the face, knocking her off her center of balance, she stumbling to the side to rest against the wall. Her body was twisted away from him, one arm folded across herself, the other clutched to her face, which I couldn't see. I cried out, my body freezing up, turning ice cold. Dad took a step toward me, and Mom whirled back around, the red-hot imprint of his hand still visible on her cheek.

"No! No, Philip, no!" she cried, her voice shaking with desperation, as she pulled herself away from the wall, her shadow falling across me as she shielded me with her body. I could smell her perfume, smell the salt of her tears. "She didn't do anything. She didn't do anything! It was my fault. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. It was my fault. Don't take it out on her."

Dad stared at her, his lip curling in disgust. He ran his raised hand through his graying red hair, turned, muttered "Just don't turn on that damn music again, all right?" and stalked out.

Mom stayed there for a while, holding me close, so close I could feel her whole body trembling. I felt hot and smothered, and I wanted to pull away, but I didn't want to make her any sadder than she was, so I stayed still, barely even breathing. Eventually, she pulled away, and looked at me, gulping, the tears still matting her eyelashes. Her mascara had turned into a black mask around her eyes; I could see the tracks that the tears had trailed through her make-up, stripes of bare skin showing through the foundation. 

"Your Daddy doesn't mean it," she said softly, holding my shoulders.

"I know," I responded, even though I didn't.

"He's just…" She trailed off, and ran her soft, cool fingers through my hair. "You've got such pretty hair," she whispered. She looked into my eyes, and tried to smile. "Some day," she said, her voice still a whisper, "You're going to grow up, and you're going to be the prettiest girl in the world. In the whole, wide world. And none of all this will matter a bit. Because you'll never be sad again."

She sniffled, and wiped her eyes. "Oh, dear. I must look a mess."

"You look fine, Mommy." I would've said anything, anything, to make her feel happy again.

She smiled. "Thanks, honey. Now let's see you smile. I'll feel a lot better if I can just see your beautiful smile."  
I didn't want to smile. My heart was a stone, a weighted stone, inside my body. But I smiled anyway.

***

****

They've begun to take notice, at last. The media. Nothing sells to the public like a beautiful woman who might well be dead.

Seeking respite from the girl's endless singing, a mindless dirge that seems to follow me from room to room, I switch on the television set, which crackles to life amid a burst of static; it has been a long time since it has been in use. Flicking past the usual garbage, I finally hit upon a news programme, and, as I had expected, the face of my subject eventually greets me, the hysterical words FASHION MODEL MISSING plastered across the lower part of the screen. A past image, of course. A glamor shot, posed and painted and airbrushed to within an inch of its unrealistically perfect simulacrum of life. Nothing like the pale, lank-haired, dead-eyed heap who lies, all gangly arms and legs, hunched against the wall of my old room upstairs, filling it with the sour tang of her sweat; the creature who stares through me whenever I bring up a tray, who, for the last three days and nights, has neither slept a moment on the mattress nor taken a bite of the food.

What would they say, I wonder, if they could see _that _version of her? Not the swaying, flirtatious catwalk queen who parades through the footage they display; not the mannequin of still magazine photographs, draped in costly silks and satins; certainly not the devoted wife of Peter Parker, the callow youth from her wallet photo, looking even more wan and considerably more haggard in his brief televisual appearance. "I don't know where she is," he says, his voice tired, almost irritable. "And I, I, I've been looking everywhere. _Everywhere._ If anyone knows anything, come forward, please…" He gazes into the camera, eyes shadowed with exhaustion. "And, MJ, if you're watching this, please, please come home. I miss you. I love you."

I snort. How much would you love her, little boy, if you could see her as she is now, a black tentacle curving out of the center of her spine, an unthinkable blemish on her beauty? Would you take her in your arms then, whisper soothing words of love? Or would you cry out in disgust and push her away?

The toadying press, her snivelling fashionista friends, her milquetoast husband. Would any of them give a damn about her if she weren't what she is? If she were a different kind of woman, a plain woman, a fat, ugly woman with nothing physical to recommend her to Society at large? The kind of woman you never notice when you walk down the street, certainly not the kind of woman who figures in anyone's fantasies?

I think not. I think very much not. But I suppose we'll find out soon enough.

I gaze at the image of her husband. Peter Parker. Something nags at me when I look upon his guileless face; something tells me I really ought to know who he is, know something about him beyond merely his betrothal to my girl. It is a feeling that overtakes me often, regarding a great many subjects; sometimes I will pass by a building, a park, a crack in an unfamiliar sidewalk, and will be struck with a feeling most would refer to as _déjà vu_. 

I died, once. This is not something many people can claim, but I am one of them. When I returned from the land of the dead, amid circumstances I can barely recall now, my memory had been scoured, wiped clean, a _tabula rasa_. It remained to a former colleague, Doctor Carolyn Trainer, to brief me on the facts of my own life. To this day, I recall only what she told me, and even that appears to be slipping away.

Every so often, even now, I seem to feel half-dead memories rising to the surface of my mind, the way the skeletons of whales rise to the surface of the ocean after a storm. For instance, I remember Doctor Trainer by my side, aiding and abetting me, and that she loved me for reasons I could neither fathom nor bring myself ever to discuss with her; but I don't remember what eventually became of her. It seems that one day she was here, the next she was gone. And I remember Stunner, my precious girl, who burned across my mind like solar fire, and how she used to touch me, and how she vanished back into the comatose mind of Angelina Brancale; but I don't remember where she resides now, or whether she ever emerged from her convalescence. I remember that I was to be married at one point; I even remember standing at the altar, sweating, nervous, excited, in a tuxedo, and my bride-to-be in a lacy froth of wedding dress; but I don't remember her name, or her face, or why she would ever have wanted to marry me in the first place.

Most of my forgotten memories, I note, seem to be intimately linked with love. Sometimes I believe that I don't remember these things because I don't want to. Sometimes I believe that we are doomed only to forget the things that, however fleetingly, made us happy. And sometimes I believe, lying awake at night and staring into the darkness, that I was never truly resurrected; that part of me still lies dead in the cold and barren earth, and that the gradual loss of my memories is in fact my mind's desperate attempt to return to the peacefulness and solitude of the grave.

I realise I have been sitting here, lost in my thoughts, for half an hour; the news is long since over. I switch the television off, but even this affords me no relief; for, every time the house is silent, I can hear her, upstairs, singing, singing, always singing. 

In this house, I can never be alone.

***

When she left him, she bundled us up in the middle of the night, whispering to us to pack our things quickly, to go out into the freezing night air to where the warm car waited in the driveway. We were both so excited, standing there in our nightdresses, holding our duffle bags, thrilled to be up so late. I could see every star in the sky, even as we were driving away.

Dad was the wounded party, of course. When Mom left him, when she took us with her and stole away in the dead of night, he was devastated. His life was in tatters, his college-professor life, and it was all because of her, the penniless former beauty queen from Michigan who bore his children and his rage. And the courts believed him. He was repaid for his loss, the loss of his darling, dearest children, with every dollar and cent that my mother had to her name.

Mom could have won the case. If she had only told them about the drinking, the slapping, the threats, the taunts. But she refused. Didn't see the need, she said, to drag his reputation through the mud. 

Gayle cursed him, called him the filthiest names, swore she'd despise him until the day she died, that she had no father, he was dead to her. But I couldn't do that. I couldn't hate him. It would be wrong of me to hate him. He was my Daddy.

Moving, constantly moving. House to house. State to state. Farmed out amongst the relatives, crammed into houses with resentful young cousins and steely-eyed adult aunts. Life a blur. Home a memory.

Then, Uncle Frank.

Mom's brother Frank. Six foot, ex-Marine Corps, brush-cut hair, bulldog face, tattooed ham-hock arms squeezed through soiled wife-beater. Sure, we could stay with him. Sure, he and the wife and kids could make room. But we had to earn our keep. No skiving in _his_ house, nosirree. 

Mom was his slave. She cooked. She cleaned. Her back hurt and she still had to kneel down and scrub the floors. Her hands shook and she still had to stand over the stove for an hour, two hours, three. If we ever complained, Frank made it clear, we were out on the street. We were here out of the goodness of his heart. He never lifted a finger.

But I couldn't hate Frank. I couldn't. He was family. He was strict but fair. He was the closest thing to a father I had now, now that Dad wouldn't return my calls, wouldn't write back to my letters. I had to be a good girl. I had to smile.

I found a bottle of bourbon in Frank's liquor cabinet one night, when I was fourteen. Without even thinking about it, I swallowed it down, all of it, grinding my teeth as the sour heat of it swirled down into the pit of my stomach. When Frank found me, I was rolling around on the floor, giggling to myself, the empty bottle resting on my stomach. I don't know what made my headache worse – the hangover, or the screaming match that ensued as Mom pleaded with Frank to let me stay in his house.

I made friends. I can't remember their names now, but they were my friends. We stayed out so late, in rooms full of bright neon and mirrorball fragmentation, the music pounding from one side of my skull to the other as I threw myself around the dance floor, my reflection in the mirrored floor whirling with me. I didn't listen to Mom's Sixties stuff any more: my soundtrack now was Dead Or Alive, New Order, Nazareth. And there was always someone there, someone friendly, someone with booze. I loved bourbon, and whisky, and tequila, and funny little cocktails with funny little names. 

I was fifteen now. Every evening I stumbled home at ungodly hours, giggling, eyes still dazzled by party lights, breath suffused with alcohol, praying Frank wouldn't be up. Gayle knew, but she didn't say anything, to me or anyone else, even though I knew she didn't like it. I didn't care. I was happy. Everyone loved me. The boys loved me. I was fun, I was charming, I was a thrill to be around. And I was beautiful. Everyone agreed on that. 

Nothing else mattered, because I was so damn beautiful.

***

****

Five days, and still the mattress is undisturbed, the food uneaten. Dark shadows wax beneath her blank eyes, like black half-moons, and she is growing visibly thinner – a dangerous proposition for one already so lean. This will not do. I attempt, this morning, to feed her by hand, cradling the back of her head with one tentacle, clasping a spoonful of oatmeal in another, trying to fit it between her lips. Her tuneless singing, repetitive and unceasing, makes such an action impossible, and eventually, I give up. 

My desire to leave this house is growing vaguely desperate. If she would only be silent, only stop singing, it might at least be bearable; as it is, the sound of that fragile female voice dredges up only more memories, memories I spend most of my waking hours trying to escape. Mother.

Mother used to sing, too, during housework, washing dishes, hanging out clothes to dry on the line. **Her clear, ringing voice would follow me from room to room, much as the disembodied voice of this girl does now, and I took such comfort from it, the notion that, wherever I went, she and her love went with me. At school, being ridiculed by girls, brutalised by boys, I would long for her to be near, to hold me and make everything safe again. I needed her soft brown eyes, her callused hands stroking my hair, the warm darkness of her embrace. Her voice murmuring words of encouragement, words that were balm to the aches of my soul. "It's all right, Otto. Mommy's here. I'm not going anywhere. You're a good boy, a very good boy, and don't you listen to anyone who tries to tell you you're not, okay?"**

She was so unlike my father, so utterly unlike him. She'd married beneath her and all three of us knew it; she a lavender-scented hearth angel from an upper-middle-class Greek-American family, he a blue-collar laborer of German stock, smelling of sweat and cheap meat, spending his days building things up, coming home and tearing things down. Such as his son, for example.

"Swear to God, Mary," he said, not without joviality, as he entered the kitchen after a hard day's work, snatching the inevitable beer from the fridge, heading back into the dining area and scrutinising me critically. "Swear to God, the kid gets fatter every time I see him. Whatcha feeding him? Buffalo wings? Or whole buffalos?" And he'd snort with laughter at his own scathing wit.

Mother glared at him as she set a plate of toast and jam down in front of me. "He's _not fat_. He's a growing boy and he needs to eat. His metabolism –"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I wouldn't expect you to agree with me; you're no Sophia Loren yourself," he responded, swatting her on the backside. "That's a rump you could use as a sofa cushion. Hell, you and Otto side-by-side'd make up a whole lounge set." Guffaw.

Mother turned her face away, the set of her jaw betraying the grinding of her teeth. She had been thin when she'd married him; I don't suppose it ever occurred to my father that a combination of being at home all day and having borne his child would have contributed to her weight gain. But, having not gotten a rise from her, he swiftly turned his attentions back to me.

"So how you doin', Tubby? You got a girl yet?"

"He's nine years old," my mother said, her voice tight as she washed the dishes.

"Hey, I hadda girl at nine. 'Course, I also didn't weigh as much as a monster truck, myself." 

I lowered my head and took a large bite of toast; even with the sweet spread of jam, it tasted like cinders in my mouth. My father gestured at me with a flourish.

"Aaaand, case in point, right there."

"I'm not ugly," I mumbled.

"What was that, kiddo?" my father leaned towards me, eyebrows raised threateningly. He'd had a bad day at work, was looking for a fight. I determined that I would not give it to him. He would have to work to hurt me.

"Nothing."

"Nothing. Big, fat nothing." He chuckled. "Pretty good description of you, too, huh, boy?"

"Please," Mother ground out, her voice soft but edged with steel. 

"Please, what?" my father challenged, turning back around to face her.

"Don't do this. Just leave him be. He does well in school, marvellously well. Top of his grade in Science class. So what if he's…if he's big-boned for his age? So what if he hasn't got a girlfriend yet?" She gazed at me, her eyes alight with love. "He's going to grow up to be something wonderful. He's going to show people things they've never seen before." The love-light faded as she turned back to my father, glaring at him. "And he doesn't need some slob of a construction worker belittling him every single time he comes home!"

"Slob?" my father sputtered. "Oh, I'm a goddamn _slob_, am I, Mary? Oh, yeah, that must be why I throw my back out every day at the building site, trying to put _even more_ food on the table for this tub of lard – because I'm a _slob!_ You wanna talk slobs, huh? Let's talk about my wife and son, both so damn fat they can barely fit through the kitchen door –"

And on and on they went, around in endless circles, and I blocked it out as I ate, grimly and without pleasure, focusing on nothing but the texture of the food in my mouth, the release of endorphins in my brain as I chewed. It always made me feel better, not so much because of the taste or the nourishment it provided me, but because it had been supplied by my mother, a tangible expression of her love.

Even today, even after all that has transpired, there are times when I miss her, miss the all-encompassing, enfolding warmth of her pride in me and unconditional joy in my existence, more than words can express. She caused me to abandon my first and my truest love, Mary Alice Anders, and I did it, just so that I would never lose _her_. But I did anyway. I left my Mary Alice, of the ebony hair and midnight-blue eyes, ruthlessly severed my aching heart-strings; and it was for nothing, for a woman who died of a heart attack only days later. Even so, I can't bring myself to resent her, not entirely. I resent circumstance, and I resent fate, and destiny, and all those other pretty, meaningless words that separated us, but I do not hate her.

But I still hate _you_, you miserable, disgusting swine of a man. I will always despise you and all you stand for; all you ever taught me was strength, and that I learned by observing just how much of it you lacked. On the night you died, in the bed in which I now sleep every night, I sat there in the corner of the room, trembling in abject terror, in case you woke up. Even now, I'm glad you never did. 

And now here I am, Father. I'm strong, crushingly strong. I could more than hold my own in a fight with you now; I wouldn't have to bow my head and devour my bitterness any more. I even have a beautiful woman, upstairs, right now, in my bedroom. Does that make me enough of a _man_ for you, you old bastard?

I want to leave this house. Right now. I want to go out, breathe the fresh air, stretch my limbs and rid myself of what I feel, what I remember. But I can't. I can't leave her. There's no telling what she might do to herself, if I'm not here once the shock wears off. She might damage the apparatus. She might attempt to end her life, before I have a chance to witness the results of my experiment. 

I can't leave her.

***

Click flash click click flash click flash. Turn this way, baby. Let's see your rebellious. Let's see your angry. Let's see your melancholy. And now let's see you smile.

Turn this way and that. Let them arrange you however they want, move your limbs around like you were nothing but meat on display. Take something off, take everything off – everyone's doing it. It's _art_. What, you're not some kind of prude, are you? Attagirl. Now smile. Click. Flash.

In demand, now. They all wanted me. Need someone to shill a new perfume line? Get me that foxy redhead. Need someone who looks good in jeans? How about that chick with the gazungas, the one from _Vogue_? Whatshername. Mary Lou. Marianne. Something like that. Look, who cares what her name is? She's hot. She's gorgeous. Beautiful.

And the auditions, later. Okay, Miss, thank you, I think we've seen enough. It's not that we don't like what you did, you're just a little too glam for the part, a little too pretty, a little too lightweight. Nobody would believe you. Nobody would take you seriously. I mean, no offense, hon, but you're no Blanche Dubois, are you? You're no Lady Macbeth, no Hedda Gabler, Miss Julie, Pirate Jenny. You're not what we're looking for. But don't worry. We're sure you'll find acting work somewhere else. How could you not? With a face like that.

Or: yes, you're exactly what we're looking for. Would you turn around, please? Yes. Great. Beautiful. Would you take your top off for us? This role has a lot of nudity in it. Dialogue? No, sorry, there isn't much in this part. You get shot a few scenes later, though. Now, the top, if you would…?

Click flash click. Flash. Click.

Lap it up, baby. You're gonna be a star some day.

***

****

The seventh day. A whole week has passed since her transformation. Still she has not returned to the world of the present; still her eyes are vacant, far away, even as I gently roll her onto her side in order to check that the surgical wounds are properly healing. 

Excellent. Aside from some mild bruising and minor crusting around the area, it would appear that she and the tentacle are bonding nicely. The skin has almost completed its regrowth around the base of the foreign object, incorporating it nearly seamlessly into her physiology; it is now almost impossible to tell where the organic matter ends and the artificial begins. A marvel, the way in which the human body seems to be able to adapt itself to anything Nature or Science can inflict upon it; it seems a shame that the human mind often cannot follow suit.

The tentacle lies, as limp as the rest of her body, stretched out across the wooden floorboards, a sleeping serpent. I gaze upon it with a small pang of pride, of admiration. It really is a most elegant design, far more elegant than the mechanical arms I myself possess. Gleaming black, as thin and flexible as a whip, a whispered hint of its power and strength in its every coil. Almost feminine, in its way. It suits her well. 

Satisfied, I roll her back over into her former position against the wall, careful not to move her too roughly or hastily; and before I even have time to whirl around, a rush of air whistles past my face, and a sudden sharp pain erupts upon my left cheek, just beneath my eye. I cry out, more from surprise than from the pain; pressing a hand to the stinging area, my fingers come away bloody.

I stare wildly around the room, before my eyes fall upon the tentacle, lying as limp as ever upon the floor. Its position has changed. Its claws are unsheathed. They are wet with blood. 

I stare at it a few moments more; after several beats of silence, the claws, with a metallic slicing sound, close themselves up.

I stand there, holding my hand to my wounded cheek, and I glance back down at the girl. She has not moved a muscle. It must have been an independent motor function, a muscular spasm.

Even so, I imagine, just for a moment, that I see a dark glimmer deep within her eyes.

***

Why, Daddy, of _course _I forgive you. Of course, now that you've served your time in jail (theft, was it?), now that you're a changed man, now that you've finally reached a point where you can _acknowledge_ all the terrible mistakes you made – why wouldn't I take you back into my life with open arms? 

I choked down all my resentment, all my rage. The arrogance of the man. The very notion that, now that Mom was dead and moldering in the ground, after he had enlisted my sister as an accomplice to his crimes, he hoped he would find it in my heart to forgive him. But I did. I forgave him. I was magnanimous. I wasn't bitter. I didn't hold a grudge. Of course not! I threw my arms around him, I called him Daddy, and we all lived happily ever after.

He never calls.

He never writes. When I tried to phone him, some time after our tearful, heartfelt reunion, I found the number had been disconnected. All my life, disconnected numbers. People cutting me off before I even began. I had forgiven. Now I was forgotten.

Gayle, as well. Another joyous, all-is-forgiven reunion. And you know, I really thought we could make it work this time, be sisters in more than name. But no. We were different people from the start, too different, and as we grew older we became more different still. You see, she was the smart one. I was the pretty one. She was the one with responsibilities, two children, Tommy and Kevin, button-bright beautiful boys; I was the one who ran out on her, when she'd needed my help, whose smiling, cherry-colored head was filled with nothing but boys and parties and booze and how much everyone loved me. No, you don't forget things like that, not if you've allowed them to simmer inside you for seven years, festering like poisoned wounds; not if you're Gayle, abandoned by your father, your husband, your stupid, shallow, sexy sister. The reunion lasted maybe a couple of months. Then we were back where we started, the silence between us as frozen and impenetrable as an ice wall. 

Gayle, cold, unbending, rigid bitch Gayle. You have my father's number. You know where he lives now. You talk to him, I know you do. Do you discuss me, ever? Do you ever talk to each other about fairy-princess Mary Jane, the one who let you both down so totally and utterly that you severed her from your lives like a diseased limb? Are you close now? You swore he was dead to you, Gayle. Did you swear that of me, too?

But never mind, never mind. I had done without your love before. I had more than enough love in my life to fill that void.

Peter.

Peter's warm brown eyes. Peter's messy hair. Peter's wiry body, pressed against mine in the dark, breathing soft and slow. The things in the apartment weren't mine, they were ours, and I loved being able to say that. I loved being part of an _us_, a _we_, an _our_. I was bonded to him, my skin an extension of his skin, his flesh an extension of my flesh. We had each other. Each other. Each, and the other. 

Everything about him. The way his hair flops into his eyes when he reads the newspaper. The ridiculous, poorly-executed songs he belts out in the shower, louder than the streaming water, carrying into the bedroom. The horrible puns and the silly quips and the way he's never there for me. I can love everything that is Peter's, because it _is_ Peter's, and so it becomes ours.

When I once asked him why he always avoided me way back in the day – when Aunt Anna and his Aunt May were constantly trying to pair us off – he answered promptly, bluntly. "They said you had a great personality. And you know what that means."

__

Ugly.

The word, unspoken, hung in the air between us. I resumed the conversation immediately, allowing no silences, even as my mind stayed fixed at that point. Peter, you would never have loved me, would you, if I had had a great personality and nothing else? You, the high school geek, scrawny Peter Parker, the boy nobody has a crush on, would never have looked twice at a girl who was anything like you. 

I would never have dated you. Never have married you. Never have given birth to your dead child.

I lay in the hospital ward for days. Nothing could have moved me. Nothing could haved touched me. The world was stripped of color, made up only of configurations of light and shade. My child, my child. I held you in my body for months. I held you in my arms for only a moment. Hours of pain, of being split apart, to give not life, but death. My little May. My little girl. 

When I came home, silent, Peter and I having nothing to say to each other, there were three answering machine messages. The modeling agency. They wanted me back on the job as soon as possible.

Peter erased the messages, and I don't think I ever did follow up on them.

And, shortly after, a man. He'd seen me on TV, in the magazines. I was beautiful. A goddess. He loved me. He needed me. Had to have me.

He held me prisoner for months. I lost track of how many. Nine months, maybe. The time it takes for a baby to gestate. Even huddled in that dank hole he left me in – a place to keep me safe, to admire my beauty – I could still feel that tiny creature inside me, its heart beating in time with my own. The Stalker didn't see that. Didn't feel that. Goddesses don't become pregnant. Goddesses don't know what it's like to have their children die. Goddesses don't feel anything. They only exist to be worshiped.

Family reunions. True love. Miscarriage. Kidnapping.

Everything sounds so small when you reduce it to nothing but words.

Tentacle. That's only a word. A black tentacle, stretching itself out from my spine, sprawled in front of me across dusty floorboards. A mattress. A bedpan. A tray of food swarming with cockroaches.

I'm in a room.

I'm in a room in a house.

I'm in a room in a house with Doctor Octopus.

I'm in a room in a house with Doctor Octopus who cut me open, went inside my body, grafted a slick black tentacle to my spinal cord and left me in this room, in this house.

Oh God -

I have a -

It's moving now -

Twitching, stirring in front of me. Coming to life. Using my life-force to animate itself. Spine squirming, like my skeleton uncoiling.

What has he done to me?

What has he done to me?

WHAT HAS HE DONE TO ME?

***

****

Around three in the afternoon. The shadows on the street outside are beginning to grow longer, the sunlight casting wan, watery silhouettes across the broken pavement, the cars held up by bricks, the stacks of yellowing newspapers. I feel latent electricity in the air, crackling down the lengths of my tentacles. It will rain again soon. Good. I prefer it when it rains.

I'm standing, somewhat uncomfortably crowded, in the kitchen area, setting the kettle to boil, my tentacles washing and drying the dishes in the sink. It's a quiet afternoon, peaceful, relaxing. I allow my mind to wander, focusing only on the splashing of water in the sink, the clatter of the dishes, the hissing of the kettle.

Almost half an hour passes in this manner before I realise something.

The singing has stopped.

***

My head slams against the floorboards; my fingernails dig into the wood, sending splinters into my flesh; my shrieks muffled by my hair, hanging in greasy, knotted clumps down over my face. I sit up on my knees, covering my eyes with my sweaty palms, screaming into them. The tentacle, through no action of my own, thrashes and thumps about wildly, like a dying animal, as if it too is in pain. Every time the horrible thing moves, my spine uncoils. It's like having a freezing cold worm crawling down your vertebrae, bone by bone. Even if I shut my eyes, didn't see the repulsive thing twisting and arching in front of me, I could still never forget that it was there. It isn't something outside of me. It's in me. It isn't part of me. It never could be. It's a parasite, and it's in me, and it's all because of him.

Doctor Octopus. I freeze, my wails stifling in my throat. The tentacle holds itself still as a statue, paused in mid-thrash. I can't alert him. I can't face him again. Forget being strong. Forget standing my ground, fighting my corner. I can't face him again, can't let him near me, can't let him touch me. 

I have to get out of this house.

I have to escape.

I have to find Peter.

Peter will make everything all right. He always does. Peter fights the bad guys and sends them to jail, and he can take me to hospital and have this (_oh my God oh it's really real it's really real it's really_) have this _tentacle_ removed. I can be put back together again. All I need to do is get out, and get Peter.

I stand. I fall. My legs are strands of cooked spaghetti, limp, weak. I try again. I fall again. Cursing, I pound the floor with my fist. Christ. I can't do this. I can barely move. My muscles have atrophied already, shot to hell; I don't even know how long I've been here. I can't stand up. I can't walk. Can't run. I'm useless, helpless.

The tentacle.

Instantly, the moment the thought pops into my head, the tentacle snaps to attention, wavering before me, again awaiting my orders. I look around wildly for something to cling on to.

Across the room, a window. Sickly light falls through it, rain-light, half-light. Metal bars cross-hatch the glass, prison bars, almost. A hand-hold.

I stare at the bars, at one bar in particular. Concentrate, MJ. Focus. Squeezing out every other thought from my confused, screaming brain, I narrow my eyes, staring with almost radioactive intensity at that one bar.

__

Grab the bar.

Grab the bar.

Grab the bar.

The tentacle twitches.

__

Grab the bar.

It wavers, flip-flops around a little. My spine twists, wrenches.

Grab the bar, grab the goddamn bar.

A final wrench, so strong it damn near knocks the breath out of me. The tentacle shoots forward like a laser beam; the claws burst open; in the blink of an eye, they have a firm, strong hold on the bar, hanging on to it grimly. Maybe I'm starting to hallucinate, because I swear to God the thing seems to look back at me attentively, eager for more instructions.

Okay. Good. Got the bar.

__

Pull me over there.

This time it doesn't need to be asked twice. Without a moment's warning, I'm whisked off my feet as the tentacle contracts into itself like a rubber band; I'm spun around, and my back slams up against the bar. I cry out, smothering it at the last minute with my hand; the surgical wounds still feel raw, fresh, and the impact of my spine against the bar does nothing to make that any better.

__

Yeah, nice work, I think sarcastically, grabbing hold of the bars with my own hands, before realising I'm being sarcastic towards a mechanical object and deciding I must be cracking up.

Well, I'm on my feet now, staring out through the window, breathing slowing as the pins-and-needles prickling in my legs ebbs away. I can see out across what looks like the most normal suburban street in the world – a poor suburban street, to be sure (garbage everywhere, broken paving, crappy cars), maybe one that used to be kind of affluent, but still just a suburban street. The kind of place you'd see everywhere in the world, maybe pass through once or twice, maybe live. Not the kind of place you'd think a crazy supervillain would live, not the kind of place where girls are sliced open and bits of machinery put in their bodies. It might've been a nice place once. It sure as hell isn't now.

I gaze up at the point where the claws still cling to the bar, a little above my head. The tentacle still waits, taut with tension, for me to give it another order. The bars are all part of the same grille, screwed down around the window-pane. Holding onto one bar and wrenching it real hard would pull off the whole grille. There'd be nothing in front of me but a thin, grimy layer of glass.

__

Pull.

Pull the grille off.

Pull this whole house down, if you have to. But pull.

Pull.

At first, it doesn't seem to be doing anything. It wavers again. Its claws even seem to loosen once or twice, threatening to let go, to fall, clanking, to the ground. I squeeze my eyes shut, visualise the grille coming off the window, see in my mind the plaster flaking away, showering down onto the floor, the wooden pane splintering, as the metal bars come away, leaving only the glass.

__

Pull.

My spine strains. My face is blistering hot, beads of sweat crawling down my temples, soaking in my hair. My fists are clasped around the bars so tightly I feel my nails biting into the palms. It feels, it really feels, as though my spine is being torn out through the skin of my back. The tentacle heaves, shudders, sending shockwaves through my bones, pulling, pulling, pulling.

I'm gonna leave this house.

I'm gonna escape and get back to Peter.

I'm not gonna be Gwen Stacy.

I'm nobody's victim.

A rasping sound, a crumbling, splintering. Flakes of plaster falling to the floor. The grille shakes. A metallic squeal, the claws grinding against the bar so hard I'm amazed sparks don't fly. Metal separating from wood. The pain. The pain. Every muscle in me tensed, aching, cramping with the strain. My eyes clamped shut. 

With one last, wrenching, convulsive effort, the grille erupts from the window-pane in a burst of plaster and splinters. My eyes fly open; the tentacle hurls the grille across the room, all the way over onto the mattress, the heavy metal hitting the feather-stuff casing with only a muffled _whumpf. _My mouth opens as wide as a fish, and I let out a rasping gasp, sucking in the air, feeling my heart slowing, my muscles relaxing one by one. I slump to the floor just below the window, my eyes darting over to the door I haven't even tried, knowing it to be locked. Octopus. He must have heard that, must have. He'll be up here any moment. I can almost imagine I hear the soft thump of his tentacles hitting the stairs.

I can't rest yet. Once I'm home. Once I'm in a bed (have I slept at all?), once Peter is there, rocking me to sleep. But not yet. Not now. Not here.

With supreme effort, I stretch my arms above my head, gripping hold of the windowsill, pulling myself back up into a standing position, swaying dangerously. I examine the window. Reaching out, balancing my midsection against the sill, I grab hold of the sash, and, bracing myself for another struggle, haul it with all my might.

Instantly, it flies up; startled, I almost lose my balance, regaining it only by bending double over the sill, leaning out of the window, out of the house. The wind smacks me in the face, not because it's particularly strong, just because it's the first time I've felt the wind since I first woke up in this house. It's the foul, fetid stench of the city, of industrial pollution and rotting garbage. It's the sweetest thing I've ever smelled in my entire life.

I look down the face of the building. Nothing but brick, a straight drop down to the grass below. Where I will promptly die of a broken neck if I even attempt this jump. 

Is that a more attractive option than staying here, waiting for Doc Ock to come back up and add the finishing touches to his experiment?

Well, what do _you_ think?

Cautiously leaning forward a little further, I inch myself as far out over the sill as I can go, averting my eyes from the ground, ignoring the swooping sense of vertigo that falls across me. Slowly, I haul one weakened leg off the ground, and throw it across the sill. Hopping on the other, I haul it up to join its companion. Exhaling, trying to control my breathing, I shift myself into a marginally more comfortable sitting position on the sill. Shifting my backside inch by inch across to the right, I gingerly hold out my trembling arms, my fingers hooked into claws, hoping for at least a tentative hand-hold between the bricks.

Got one. And yes, it's pretty damn tentative, but what the hell, you gotta take chances. Drawing in a long, hard, deep breath, I push myself off the window-sill and cling for dear life to the side of the building. 

Suspended feet above the ground, the only things between me and gruesome death the muscles in my fingers, I hold there, frozen with fear and indecision, my breath coming in frantic, doglike gasps. My heart hurls itself against my breastbone, trying to claw its way up through my sore, dry throat. 

A voice in my head that sounds an awful lot like Gwen whispers, _You're not gonna make it._

You might as well give up, might as well just let go and fall, because you're not gonna make it.

I try to ignore it. Slowly, agonisingly slowly, I withdraw the fingers of one hand from the tenuous hold amongst the brickwork, and move it downwards. I can do this. I can –

A slip. My breath catches, eyes shoot open. My legs scramble, my hands claw, on nothing but air. The wind rushes past my face and I see nothing, no sky above me, no grass below –

A jerk, a violent tug on my spine, pushing the air from my lungs in a sound like a tyre deflating; I don't think I'm dead. I was falling. But I don't think I'm dead.

Looking up, I see the reason why I still live. The tentacle, not even needing my conscious instruction any more, has shot up, its claws dug deep into the cracked bricks – not the spaces between the bricks, but the bricks themselves – and holding fast, the body of the tentacle hanging straight down, taut as a hangman's rope.

I almost feel like I should thank it.

The tentacle halted my fall only inches from the ground; briskly, I command it to let go. It does, and I drop swiftly to the ground, as silent as a cat if not nearly as graceful. My breath hissing in my ears, I stand there a moment, trying to regroup. My mind, my thinking, is so fuzzy, so hyper-alert, sensitive to every sight, sound, scent. The grass beneath my feet rustles like tin foil. The air assails my nostrils, crawling into my skull. The gray sky above me seems to sizzle with the promise of lightning yet to come.

I don't waste a second more. Stumbling only slightly, I run, my feet pounding grass, then cracked concrete, crunching glass and weeds and God knows what else under my filthy, bare feet, as I speed away from that house like a bottle rocket. Sparing a moment for a confused thought of police and evidence and testimony, I glance back at the house's mailbox, the address. In peeling, stencilled lettering: 59 Arbor Street. 59 Arbor Street. Remember it, MJ. 59 Arbor Street.

Find Peter.

Run home, and find Peter.

Find Peter, and this will all end.

Before you know it.

Before you even have to think about what was done to you.

***

****

I stand at the ruined window, my arms folded behind my back, staring out across the street, across the area of her desertion.

My tentacles, at their minimum length, are six feet long, and can extend to a maximum of twenty-four feet. They can move, on a good day, at a speed of fifty miles per hour.

And so one might well wonder why I do not pursue her, why I do not attempt to bring her back immediately. Is she not my sole test subject? Is she not the apotheosis of my theories, made flesh? Did I not go to such trouble to secure her in the first place, to subdue her, to complete her metamorphosis? 

Ah. But there's the rub. Her metamorphosis is in fact, the furthest thing in the world from being complete.

This was not unexpected. Physically, she is changed, just as I was changed, so many years ago. And even now, she is beginning to feel the injustice of it all, feel the sting of twenty-five years' worth of suppressed pain, of the little compromises she has made here and there, the compromises the beautiful are forced to make, the compromises that chipped away at her identity, at her self. She has completed the 'reflecting' stage, and has now moved into the 'flight' stage.

So I will allow her to run. Run as far and as fast as she desires. Run to her loved ones, friends, family, spouse. 

You see, there is only so much that I can convey to her in mere words regarding the cruelty of Society's physical elitism. There are only so many times that I can attempt to convince her that our culture picks and chooses its winners and its losers, deifying them when they are beautiful, discarding them, oft-times brutally, when they are not. 

Some things you must discover for yourself in order for them to have any power, any meaning. Some sufferings you must experience first-hand. Some fire you must walk through in order to be certain that it burns.

There is no need for me to pursue her. No need whatsoever. 

Once she has been burned enough, _she_ will come back to _me_.


	4. Back on the Streets

**__**

Freak Like Me

by

****

Santanico

***

**__**

Four: Back on the Streets

***

****

When I was around twelve years old, and had developed the obsession with Greek mythology that is apparently a mandatory rite of passage for intelligent, friendless children, one of the myths that fascinated me the most was that of the sect known as the Bacchae.

Devoted followers of Dionysus, the god of chaos, the Bacchae were women, a band of wild women who lived in a state of ecstasy and hysteria, endowed with the peculiar freedom that is attendant only to the mad. The thing about these women that held me spellbound was the fact – mentioned only passingly in my mythology book – that, prior to their encounter with Dionysus, they had all been perfectly ordinary, just housewives, daughters, mothers. They had been nice and well-behaved. They had smiled sweetly, laughed demurely, lived silently. But just one meeting with the god – just one small taste of insanity – and they had torn away those veneers of respectability, those shackles and bonds of good behavior, as though they were little more than tattered ribbons. And now here they were – crazed, feral beasts, painted in blood, howling madly, dancing their dishevelled way through wild woodland, ripping apart with their bare, taloned hands anyone who dared try to stop them, even their own loved ones, children, husbands. Savage dancers, whose frenzied whirling essayed death, madness, and destruction.

In retrospect, I was a laughably romantic child.

I sit, now, on the couch in the living room, curled up with that battered old mythology book that was stored away for so many years in the attic, only accessible now due to my tentacles' reach. My re-reading of it has, however, been sporadic; I seem to be easily distracted this evening, my gaze constantly drifting upwards and out of the window, into the rain-soaked, darkened street beyond the glittering glass. 

If I close my eyes, I can see you now. You are staggering, weary, ready to fall, but you do not fall; something pushes you on, an idea, a grain of desperate hope in the back of your skull, a magic thought that somehow this can be fixed, you can be fixed. Desperately, determinedly, you ignore what cannot ever be ignored, the unnatural appendage that traces your every step, that ugly shadow that even the darkest night can never cast away from you. If you allow yourself to think of it, even for a moment, you know you will be lost. So you soldier onward through the pitiless streets, limping, in pain, bone tired, burning with a witches' brew of tempestuous emotion you struggle to keep beneath the skin, for the sake of your tenuous sanity.

Oh, yes. I know where you are, because I was once there, too. 

Be careful, my girl. Be ready to be wounded. Know that you are about to hit the ground, and brace yourself for the impact. There is no longer a place in this world for you.

Just as there is none for me.

***

A torn newspaper flutters across the grimy concrete paving of the alley behind the mission-house, sweeping past trash cans and plastic bags filled to overflowing, brick walls that seem to drip with threatening red gangland graffiti, a mangy, starving cat chasing down its tiny prey. What may or may not be a rat races over my bare foot as I perch precariously on one leg, leaning into the Salvation Army clothing bin, rummaging around for something not too torn or dirty to wear. The sickly green hospital gown Ock gave me leaves very little to the imagination, and is cold as hell besides. 

I've been sticking to the back streets since I made it back into the city, what must've been an hour, two hours ago. I never realised how enormous this city really is, how the buildings loom over you, dark and foreboding, like man-eating giants. Make one wrong move and they swallow you whole. They give nothing away, exteriors black and gleaming, betraying no sign of human life. Like Doc Ock's glasses.

Everywhere I go, every time a loose paper snaps in a passing breeze or I think I hear a footstep on the pavement, I whirl around, my breath catching and burning in my lungs, sweat slithering down my temples. Octopus. He could be anywhere. He could be following me, shadowing me right now. Maybe he'll kill me, so I can't go to the police, kill me, throw me in the river, the river where Gwen before me plummeted to her doom. 

Maybe I'm hoping he'll kill me. 

(Peter will make everything all right.)

The tentacle winds itself around my leg, bumping its head, the head that sheaths its claws, gently against my calf. Every time it touches me, every time it brushes against my skin, I cringe, I can't help it. I don't know what I did to deserve this. I wish Ock had at least told me that. I wish he'd told me it was because of something I did, something I didn't do. I wish he'd given me a reason, a reason beyond some vague idea of social upheaval. I know he's crazy. I know he probably doesn't even really know himself why he does things. But that isn't good enough. Things happen for a reason. Everything means something. 

Did I deserve this?

I must have deserved this.

(Peter will make everything all right.)

I lean down further into the darkness of the clothing bin, snatching up the first item of clothing I've yet seen that is at all wearable – a dark green man's trench coat, soiled, reeking of cigarette smoke, much too big for me, so large the sleeves hang down over my hands as if I were a five-year-old playing dress-up. I roll the sleeves up to my wrists, noticing how my hands shake. The cigarette smell is even stronger now that I'm in the coat, but it is warm, and it conceals the tentacle, and that's really all I care about. Once I get home I can shower, and I can sleep, and I can put on my own clothes and I can see Peter and he will make everything all right.

My feet are blistered, cut, covered in filth. I peer back into the clothing bin, trying to see if there are any shoes in there, when a clicking sound behind me nearly sends me out of my skin, a soft yellow light falling across me, casting my shadow in wavering relief against the brick wall as I whirl around, almost knocking over a trash can in my haste to crouch down behind it.

A few feet away, the back door of the mission-house is open, the warm light spilling from within, and a nun stands silhouetted in the doorway, leaning over, placing a saucer of milk on the step, presumably for stray cats. She's young, can't be much older than I am, and from what I can make out of her, she looks gentle, serene, the way you always think nuns are supposed to look. She couldn't hurt me. There's no way she could possibly hurt me. But I can't stop trembling, all the same. 

Several skinny cats sidle up to the nun, purring and nuzzling her; she coos at them in what sounds like Spanish. I want her desperately to go away, even as I want her to hold me and tell me comforting things that aren't true, even if they're in a language I don't understand. I shift my position, and as I do, the tentacle, snaking out from beneath the coat, bumps against the side of a trash can, knocking it over with a thunderous crash.

The nun looks up sharply, her features wary. My breath snags in my throat, caught, trapped, just as I am. The nun takes a couple of hesitant steps forward, over the threshold, one hand in the pocket of her habit. "Someone there?" she calls hesitantly.

Panic washes over my mind, and I leap up, knocking over more trash, whipping around and speeding down the alley, not even stopping to look back at her. "Hey! Hey, wait! Please!" I hear her cry out after me, but I don't stop for even a moment. I don't want her to see me. I don't want anyone to see me except Peter. 

I burst out onto a street, a street in even worse disrepair than the one on which Ock held me captive. Gangland graffiti everywhere in the darkened half-light that precedes a rainstorm; the muted noise of boom boxes, thudding through my pounding skull, my sleepless sense, eking itself out through smashed windows and paper-thin walls; rats skittering openly through the street, feasting on crumpled fast-food wrappers and rotting vegetables that lie in the road; somewhere in the distance, the howl of police or fire sirens, can't tell which. Hunched over like a bag lady, I creep down the street, burrowing deep into the stinking coat, feeling the first few cold drops of rain sting my face. I've lived in New York for so long now, I thought I knew the place inside and out, but I have no idea where I am. I've lost my sense of direction. I've lost my center. And if this light spit of rain erupts into a thunderstorm, I'll be even more disoriented than I am now. I'll never find Peter, never find shelter. I'll circle this city like a dying bird, wandering forever, hopeless, helpless. 

The silence of the street, the calm in the storm's eye, frightens me. Only the faint music gives me any hint that there is life in this place, and it does nothing but threaten, the roar of distant thunder. My eyelids hang low over my eyes, so low I can feel the lashes brush the top of my cheekbones, heavy with unspent sleep, but even if there were anywhere I could rest, I still wouldn't be able to; I stagger onward, propelled by nothing more than dulled fear and single-mindedness.

I start to sing to calm myself, just to give myself a moment's peace: "_My boyfriend's back and you're gon-na be in trou-ble, hey la, hey la, my boyfriend's back…" _My voice echoes up and down the deserted street, doing nothing but emphasise just how alone I really am. I draw the coat taut around myself, as if I'm trying to disappear inside it, and as I do, the tentacle snakes upward, cautiously peeking out from my collar, and tries to drape itself around my shoulders. I narrow my eyes, make a sharp, feral hissing noise I don't think I've ever heard myself make before, and it drops away as if I've frightened it. I'm so tired, so cold and exhausted, I can't even wonder why I did that. 

How long has it been since I last ate? My stomach is growling like a wild thing, hurting so badly the pain almost doubles me over. My mouth tastes like something died in it. But even if I had any money, I couldn't buy any food; just the thought of going near a stranger, looking the way I do, with this thing growing out of me, is enough to make my mouth dry out, my skull ache with the shame and senselessness and stupidity of it all. But, Jesus, I'm so hungry…

Overcome by a wave of weakness and nausea, I sit down, heavily, on the curb, not even knowing I've done it until I'm already hunched over, staring down into the gutter, watching the polluted rainwater swirl and spiral down into the storm drains. I have to think. Got to make a plan. I look up, scanning the skies, the buildings that tower above me, trying to get my bearings, to get some kind of idea as to just where in the hell I am. I look around, flicking my sodden bangs out of my eyes as the rain begins to intensify, my tired gaze sweeping the street, looking for signs, for things I recognise. I know this neighborhood. I do. Chloe. Chloe lives near here. Chloe's apartment is a couple of blocks from here! 

I stand, quickly, too quickly, my weakened legs stumbling, head spinning slightly, but I don't care, I start walking again, quicker this time. Once I get to Chloe's, I can call Peter and tell him I'm okay and he can come get me and he can get this thing taken off me and everything will be good again.

Peter will make everything all right.

Peter _always_ makes everything all right.

****

***

Chloe earns a pretty fair living doing the rounds of the modelling circuit, but you'd never know it to look at the dump where she lives. It's a smallish apartment block just edging the awful neighborhood I've just escaped, a dilapidated brick building painted in cheap whitewash that runs in chalky rivulets down the walls whenever it rains. Several of the windows on the higher floors are cracked, in spiralling circles of splintered glass that resemble cobwebs (cobwebs, spiderwebs, oh God, Peter, don't worry, I'm coming home). Chloe's family is pretty rich, so she lives here by choice; her father has offered to put her up in a nice furnished loft in the Village, but she always says no, says living with people with less money than her is helping to build her character. There's probably some snide remark to be made about that, but I'm too tired and it's too easy, so I push it out of my mind, climb the cracked front steps, push open the smeared glass double-doors, and let myself into the front hall, more to get out of the rain than for anything else.

I needn't have bothered. The leaks in the walls and ceiling have gotten even worse since I was last here; the water washes around my bare feet as they slap against the chipped tiles, pours down the cheap plaster walls, drips down off the ceiling into the rusted iron mailboxes, soaking any letters that might be inside. All the lights have blown out, all except for one blinking, fizzing, achingly horrible fluorescent light, a sickly blue color, designed that way to hinder anyone looking for a vein. It makes my head hurt, my stomach roil, so I lower my eyelids in an attempt to shield my eyes from its glare, and slosh my way over to the row of buzzers. With a shaking finger, I press Chloe's, number fourteen, quickly, before I have time to chicken out.

Faster than I expected, her voice, the first familiar voice I've heard in an eternity, crackles to life. "Hello?"

I dry up. I stand there, staring at the black voice-box, my mind totally blanked on what it is I'm supposed to say now. I'm afraid, all of a sudden, so horribly afraid. I don't feel like I can talk to anybody. This was a stupid idea. I should go. 

"Hello?" Chloe demands, sounding impatient.

My voice emerges, almost surprising me, a weak and tiny thing only barely making it past my lips. "Chloe?"

"Who's this?" 

"Chloe, it's…it's me," I whisper.

"That's not…Mary Jane? Oh. Oh my God - is that you?"

I swallow, lick my dry lips. "Yeah."

"_Ohhhh_ my _God_. You have no idea, I – you've just – I mean, it's j – hang on, hang on, do not move, do not go anywhere, I'll buzz you in, okay? Just come right on up."

A harsh buzzing sound, and the inner door, as I push against it, yields. 

I move slowly up the dirt-encrusted staircase, my feet slimy with mud, my arms wrapped tightly around myself; I realise dimly that my hands are bunched in fists against the material, as if I'm getting ready for a fight. I lower them, with some effort, just as Chloe's pale face, winged by her short, feathered blonde hair, materialises upside-down from over the railing, a few feet up, peeing anxiously down at me. "God, MJ," she murmurs "Look at you."

Yeah. Look at me.

She rushes down halfway to meet me, and wraps a supportive arm around my shoulders, holding me close; almost involuntarily, I sag against her as a feeling of exhausted relief washes over me. She leads me all the way up the steps, and into her apartment, talking all the while; I barely hear a word she says, just happy to be in a friendly place, but I gather it's something along the lines of "We've all been looking for you" and "We thought maybe you might even be dead".

She carefully tilts herself to one side, sliding me smoothly down onto the leather couch; the inside of her place is something to see, a place so utterly different from the rest of the apartment block that you'd swear you'd walked into the wrong building. She's decorated it in the style to which she is accustomed, all mood lighting and shag carpeting and muslin curtains and soft leather furniture. I sink into the couch with a sigh, closing my eyes, thinking vaguely how good she looks, how horrible I must look by comparison. Chloe is in the well-appointed little kitchenette, setting up a kettle to boil, still jabbering on; the only thing she says that gets my attention is something involving the word 'Peter'.

"Peter?" I ask blearily, sitting up as much as I can.

"Yeah," she says, staring at me with huge blue porcelain-doll eyes. "Now _he_ has just been totally _frantic_, MJ. Looked for you like _everywhere_. Even went on TV about a week ago, not for very long but for a little while. He's in a bad way, man. We gotta phone him or something, tell him you're okay…"

I smile, warmth cascading through my chilled, damaged body. Peter's been looking for me. Peter cares. He still loves me. Still needs me. 

"Hey, listen," Chloe says, bringing two cups of steaming coffee over to the couch and setting them down on the glass table before me "I didn't wanna say anything, but, man, Mary Jane, you just look like hell on toast. Where have you been? What the hell _happened_ to you? I mean, _seriously_, kiddo."

I exhale, lowering my face into my hands; just the thought of recounting everything that's happened makes me feel tired beyond belief. "Have I really been gone a week?" I ask her, my voice muffled.

"More," she says, impatient to hear my story. "Like, ten days, eleven maybe, something like that. You gotta tell me, MJ. Where you been? C'mon, I was worried, y'know? And if something really, you know, bad happened, then you gotta tell me, you gotta open up."

A bitter laugh burbles from my lips; Chloe looks startled, a little scared, and I don't blame her. "I've been opened up pretty well already, Clo."

"What does that mean?" she demands, then covers her mouth, eyes widening in horror. "Oh God. MJ, did you get…? Did some guy…?"

I shake my heavy head. "No, Chloe. I wasn't raped. I…Oh, look, I can't, I don't want to discuss it right now. What I really need – _who_ I really need, right now, is Peter. Can you maybe give me a lift or something? I don't feel up to walking any more…"  
Chloe nods. "Sure, sure, MJ. I understand. I do. I just wish I could do more, you know? Anything more."

I smile at her wearily. "Thanks. 'Preciate it."

Chloe stands up, walks across the room to get her keys, then stops, turns around, frowning. "But, hey, look, MJ, I gotta say, before we go, you should get changed or something. That coat really just _stinks_ of cigarettes, know what I mean? You could take a shower and I'll lend you some stuff to wear and then we can go."

The fingers of Panic, cold and icy as those of a corpse, clutch around my throat, and instinctively, I grip the coat closely around myself, shaking my head. "No. I can't."

"What? Why not? It's just an old, gross coat. Here, lemme get it…"

I shrink back, my eyes narrowing, knees pulling up to my chest. "Get away," I hiss, in a voice not my own.

Chloe starts in surprise. "Hey, MJ, I'm not gonna hurt you," she says, gently, moving slowly towards me. "Come on. It's me here. I said I'd help you, and I'll help you. You can trust me, you know?"  
I stare at her, wanting desperately to believe, so horribly ashamed of the black, whip-like thing beneath the folds of the coat, the thing I feel twisting and curling itself even as she looks at me.

"Chloe," I say, hesitantly, standing up, facing away from her, "I'll – Okay, I'll take the coat off, but you have to promise me you'll try to be okay with what you see. Promise?"

"MJ, I don't care what's happened to you, it wouldn't have been your f –"

"Just promise me!" My voice snaps out, harsh, hard.

Chloe blinks. "Yeah, sure," she says, slightly annoyed. "Yes. I promise."  
I take a breath, and slowly, I shrug off the coat, allowing it to fall in a grimy heap at my bruised feet.

Behind me, I hear an intake of breath. The hospital gown is almost backless. She can see everything.

A silence ticks by, longer than a year. Then, a voice, small and uninflected, its flatness chilling my blood. "Is this a joke?"

I turn around, staring at the carpet, and shake my head.

"Come on, MJ. Is this a goddamn joke?" she demands, and a note of hysteria creeps into her voice.

"No," I respond, but my voice has failed me, and I only mouth the word.

"What the hell _is_…?" She trails off, and I slowly raise my head to look at her. She has gone absolutely white, and is staring openly, her jaw slack. 

I take a step towards her, extending my arms. "Chloe –"

And before her name has even fallen from my lips, a shriek tears out of her, a shriek like a bolt of lightning striking me in the ribcage, and she stumbles backward, grasping wildly around for a weapon, not seeing me, not knowing me, seeing only the tentacle, the black tentacle that has reached out for her, unknown to me, at the same time as I have. "Get the hell away!" she gibbers, pure animal terror in her eyes. "Get out!"

"Chloe, have you lost your mind? It's me, it's Mar –"

"GET OUT!" Chloe howls, snatching up an expensive-looking lamp and heaving it at me; it explodes against the wall behind me, only inches away from my head. "GET OUT! GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT! DON'T TOUCH ME! DON'T COME NEAR ME! TAKE THAT THING AND GET THE HELL OUT OF MY HOUSE!"

Her screams follow me as I snatch up the coat and race out the door, follow me down the cracked steps, echo through the hall, ring in my ears like bells as I pound the sodden pavement outside, speeding away from her apartment, my heart shuddering through every part of my body, even, it seems, inside the tentacle itself. I run, and I don't stop running until I'm blocks away from Chloe's place.

I walk fast, my arms wrapped around my body as if I'm cold, and to tell you the truth, I am; shivers, tiny shocks, are travelling up and down my vertebrae, causing the tentacle to tremble like a leaf. My whole body is shaking. 

Five minutes. That's all it took. Less than five minutes for her to go from a supportive friend to a screaming stranger. She said she didn't care what was under the coat. She promised she'd be okay with anything I showed her. But she wasn't okay. And now nothing can make this okay.

(Peter will make everything all right.)

Chloe and I were never hugely close. It wasn't like we were best buddies or anything. Honestly, sometimes she got on my nerves, and I'm sure I got on hers. But we've known each other professionally for a couple of years now, gone to a couple of parties together, been to each others' houses, and I thought we'd bonded, or something. But then she saw it, saw what Ock did to me, saw this black mechanical arm that stretches out from my spine, and she lost it. How could she look at me and see only that thing, and not see her friend at all? How could she betray me just like that, over something that wasn't even my fault, something she never even gave me the chance to explain?

It occurs to me now that I don't have many friends. Not real friends, the kind you share secrets with, the kind you turn to when the world grows too terribly dark. Chloe was actually one of the closer pals I had, and we weren't close at all – we certainly aren't now. Peter has been my best friend, my only friend, for so long that I didn't even realise that there wasn't anybody else until right now.

Gwen and I were friends. The kind of friends, admittedly, who'd tear each others' eyes out over a guy, who competed over everything, had to be better than each other, but we called ourselves friends. Even when she got Peter, when they became engaged. And when she died, I comforted him, not the other way round.

Seems like everything in my life that's of any importance has to belong in some way to Peter, too. I lose everything else.

Chloe hates me.

I bow my head against the bitter wind, and trudge along. I'm in the warehouse district now, and with one of those sudden bursts of clarity that filters into my brain only in fits and starts now, I realise that this is where I did that photo shoot with Gerald about ten days ago, on the day when all this began. That old, draughty warehouse, with the splintering packing-crates for seats and the ancient, clanking phone. The phone. Yes. I can sneak in, call Peter, get him to take me home. There's nobody there. I can just wait in the warehouse, huddle in a corner, all alone, listen to the echoing sound of my own breathing, as I wait for him, and then nobody but he will have to see me until I'm all better.

Even the idea of it makes me feel happier, almost makes me forget about Chloe, and I pick up my pace, lift my head, gaze determinedly ahead of myself, feeling stronger now that I have a clear plan of action in mind, now that I'm going somewhere I know I'll be safe.

The warehouses seem to gather around me, clustering in on all sides, enclosing the smell of metal and rain in this cramped, desiccated little street. All the buildings look the same: smashed, eyeless windows, dark bricks slick with dirty water, doors falling off their rusted hinges. I begin to worry that I might not recognise the place, or that it might be locked up; but soon the street begins to look familiar, the way I saw it from out the cab window a thousand years ago, and the warehouse, my warehouse, materialises in front of me, out of the haze of rain.

Shivering, I walk up to the door, and, hoping to God the place isn't locked, turn the door-handle. It turns swiftly, smoothly, easily; at last, at last, I've caught a break.

I pull open the door.

And my whole body just stiffens. There's no other word for it. I'm struck down with spontaneous rigor mortis by the sheer, appalling horror of it.

The warehouse is packed, from floor to ceiling, it seems, absolutely jam-packed with people. Well-dressed people, holding long-stemmed glasses of wine and champagne. Fashionable people, in expensive-looking clothes of raw silk and sequins. Polished people, laughing demurely at dry, witty jokes, making remarks they've been working on and perfecting for months. Beautiful people. Everywhere. And a great many of them are turning towards the door, and starting to stare at me.

There's a scent of sweet spices, incense, and champagne in the air. The floor is covered in silver glitter. Tasteful spotlights illuminate the room from the rafters. The music, playing at a volume that seems designed to make my already aching head explode, changes over from "Like a Rolling Stone" to Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love". Some part of me, detached entirely from everything else I'm doing or thinking right now, wonders what it is about songs of pain and humiliation that appeals so much to people with more money than God.

Over and around the music, I can make out what many of them are saying to each other, about me. None of it is feel-good material.

"Good lord. Don't tell me that's what passes for _haute couture_ these days?"

"And here I thought the homeless look had gone out in the mid-nineties."

"Who on earth _is_ she, anyway?"  
"I think the question, Lorelai, is more to the effect of _what_ is she, and what is she doing _here?_" 

"Oh, really. It's too, too pathetic, is what it is."

"MJ?"

Snapped out of my torpor, I spin around, and see Gerald, in a white turtleneck and black slacks, holding a glass of wine, coming towards me. "Gerald?" I croak.

"The very same." He holds me by the shoulders, staring me up and down. "Good God, darling, you picked a fine old time to resurface. We've all been very concerned, you know. Those of us who know you, I mean."  
"I don't think anyone knows me here," I murmur, gazing around at all the pretty faces, turning away from me in contempt and boredom. 

"Actually, dear, most of them do. It's just that you've always looked…well, somewhat _different_ than you do now. But never mind, never mind. Come over to the corner, and we'll talk. I want to know where on God's green earth you've been for the last ten days; you've been on the news and everything, you were the talk of the community for a few hours there…"

I pull my arm away, bile rising in the back of my throat. "No, Gerald. I'm sorry. I really just – I thought this place was empty, and I just came here to use the phone. I need to ring my husband. I need Peter. I don't feel too good."

"You won't stay just a _little_ while, darling? Honestly, you're no fun these days. Always going back home to Hubby. No social life whatsoever." There's a heavy scent of wine on his breath, and I realise he's half-drunk. Jesus. I am so utterly alone here.

"Gerald, please. Just let me get to the phone…"

"Well, look, sweetie, at least let me take that sodding coat off you. Godawful thing, it is, don't know where the hell you dug it up. Absolutely reeks of smoke. I'll just take –"

"Gerald!" I yelp, but it's too late; he's pulled the coat down off my shoulders, and it dangles uselessly from my wrists, exposing my back to plain view. I struggle to pull it back up, but the tentacle, the goddamn stupid brainless idiot thing, doesn't _want _to be hidden again; it unfurls, stretches out, like someone getting out of a car after a long journey, and thrashes itself around, smacking itself against the floor with a sound like a whip cracking.

The whole room falls absolutely silent; even the music dies. They stand around me in a circle, painted eyes enormous, rouged lips ajar. I don't know what to do except stand there like a moron, arms raised defensively against my chest. The only sound in the room, for long, long minutes, is that of the tentacle, merrily whipping itself through the air, like a cat's tail twitching from side to side.

The first to speak is Alessandra Georgiano, dressed in a sheath of gold, hair in a Cleopatra wig, she who told me ten days ago how "magnificent" I was. "My God!" she gasps, her hand to her jewelled throat. _"Hideous!" _

And maybe it's because she's drunk, or maybe it's just the sheer awfulness of it all getting to her, but she begins to laugh. Nervy, hysterical. Infectious.

Another well-dressed, pretty person starts to giggle. Then another. Another follows that.

All of them, every single one, even Gerald, laughing like maniacs, like wild hyenas. Tears of mirth are pouring from carefully-made-up eyes, ruining mascara; slender bodies are leaning against one another for support, doubling over. My gaze whips around, the panic of a caged animal rising inside me, choking me; I'm going to be sick, I know it, and I can't be sick in front of these people, I can't. They keep laughing, on and on, past any point where a reasonable person could find this at all amusing, past the point of nightmare. I cover my face with my hands, turn, and bolt for the door. On the way, I trip over a crate, sending me sprawling, slicing open my knee on the metal edge, skidding across the floor. This sends them into fresh paroxysms of laughter, and I can't take it, I can't. Hauling myself to my feet, ignoring the pain in my leg, I shove the door open and hurl myself back out onto the street, the door slamming behind me.

I topple onto the pavement, a feral moan of pain rising from within me, choked off by the retching sound I make as I puke into the gutter. I haven't eaten, so what I'm throwing up I don't know. Once again, I've completely lost control over my own body.

Kneeling on the sidewalk, I fold my arms around myself, desperate to stop the shaking that has seized me. They were laughing at me, they were laughing and staring, all eyes, all mouths and I want to kill them, each and every one of them, go back in there and paint the walls red with their blood, tear out their hearts, stuff broken wine-glasses down their necks, kill them all dead, kill them all…

No. It's my fault. Must be. Mine. 

This thing on me, in me. It's a curse. My friends, my colleagues, don't know me because of it. It lies on the pavement now beside me, tapping its unsheathed metal claws anxiously against the concrete, like it wants to know when we can go. I want to rip it off me, rip it out of my spine, and I don't even care if it maims me, or kills me. Anything is better than this, than being so hated, so alone and hated.

God.

Is this what it feels like to be Otto Octavius?

Don't think about him. Don't.

Think about Peter.

Get up.

Think about Peter.

Up.

Peter.

I stand, the shaking having died down, and it's one foot in front of the other, then again, then again. I'm walking again, somehow, shrugging the coat back over the tentacle, returned to a docile state, and now I'm at the train station, in the subway, the squalid black slime seeping through the white tiles of the walls, the wind blowing trash along the railroad tracks, the smell of must and urine thick in my nostrils, and now I'm on the train, praying to God no ticket collectors climb aboard, paranoid that the other passengers are eyeing me, and some of them are because I look like a crazy homeless woman. I know this because I can see myself in the darkened window. My hair is a dull, greasy red tangle; my skin the sick white of something that has lived away from sunlight all its life; my cheekbones sharp knives that stick too far out from my face; my eyes enormous, dilated things, alien, filled with darkness and fear. I touch a hand to the glass panel, wondering who this stranger could be. I certainly don't know her any more.

And then I'm out on the street again, beneath a familiar streetlamp, gazing up at a familiar window, a familiar light behind a familiar shade, where a familiar silhouette moves.

Peter.

Peter.

Peter, it's all going to be all right now.

Peter will make everything all right.

I lurch up the steps of our apartment building, the steps I've climbed a thousand times, dazed with happiness, with a seismic explosion of fierce joy that has blossomed inside me, now that I know he's here, he's only feet away, three steps away, two steps, one…

I raise my fist, not shaking now, and I knock on the door.

A brief flurry of activity inside. That voice, that sweet voice, honey in my ears: "Just a second!"

The unlatching of chains. The sliding of bolts. The clatter of a key.

And he is here.

A dishtowel thrown casually over one shoulder. Brown hair a mess, untameable, uncombable. Warm, lithe body, wiry muscles concealed under flannel shirt and jeans, the outfit he's worn once if he's worn it a million times. Beautiful burnished brown eyes, opening wide, as the jaw drops in accompaniment, but not with horror or disgust, but parting in a mad grin of pure joy. 

Peter.

"MJ?" he whispers. Then: "MJ!"

He sweeps me inside, slamming the door behind me, holding me so close, so tight, I feel as though I've been locked in somewhere so completely safe I never want to leave. Peter, my fortress. I throw my arms around his neck, holding on for dear life, dear love.

"MJ," he whispers, stroking my hair. "Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I was so afraid. I can't even – oh. Just so afraid."

I want to stay in this moment, right now, right here, for the rest of my life, Peter's strong arms rocking me back and forth, like a baby in its mother's arms. But I can't. He's going to ask. At any moment, he has to ask. I head him off.

"Doctor Octopus," I blurt out.

He pulls back, holding me by the arms. "What?"

"Doctor Octopus. Peter. He –" My breath catches in my throat; I cough, my breathing harsh, quickening even at the memory of it. "He did something to me, Peter. He did something to me." 

A shadow falls across Peter's face; I see his lip draw back, teeth exposing themselves in a snarl. "Oh, God. I knew it. I told Aunt May, she said no, but – I _knew_ it was him. Oh, MJ. Oh, my beautiful girl." He holds me close to him again, but now it's my turn to draw back.

"Don't you want to know what it was he did?" 

"No. I mean, yes. I – I don't know," Peter mutters. "I can't even think, I can't bear to…"

I step back, turn around, and without a word or a moment's hesitation, I tear off the coat.

The silence rings in my ears. It echoes through our apartment. It sings in the alley below. All the sound has left the world.

As slowly as the planet revolves, I turn around to face him.

Peter's face has blanched. It is devoid of color, utterly white. He stands, statue-still, and can do nothing but stare.

"Oh," he whispers. 

"Yes," I say. A great calm, the storm's eye, has situated itself inside my mind. It's a fragile thing. I can almost feel the moment when it is going to break.

But Peter steps forward, not backward. He comes towards me, doesn't run away. He stands before me, scanning my eyes, as though searching for the meaning of this, the reason why it happened. My spine squirms, as the tentacle shifts, restlessly.

Peter's eyes fill with tears, for me, the one who was mutilated, the one who can't cry at all. "Oh. Mary Jane," he whispers, and wraps his arms around me.

My body sags, actually loosens its muscles, so intense is my relief. Peter isn't like the others. He won't throw me away. He loves me. Needs me. Peter will make everything all right.

"Oh, MJ," he murmurs, his breath hot in my knotted hair. "What has he done to you? What has he done to you?"

I press myself against him, hard, almost hard enough to push right through that willowy body, holding him as if my arms have locked around him. It doesn't matter what Ock did to me. It's going to be fine now. It's going to be fine.

"Oh, MJ," Peter sighs. "You were beautiful. Now he's made you what _he_ is. He's made you into a freak."

Ice. My whole body is ice, crackling like an electric shock through my limbs, into my fingers, my toes. I am rigid, more rigid than the dead. 

With infinite slowness, I pull back, and I stare at Peter. He is staring back at me, a stricken look on his face as he takes me in.

In the space of one minute, of one sentence, he has become a stranger to me.

I walk backward, away from him, my arms wrapping around my shoulders, protective, wary. "What did you say?" I ask, my voice hoarse, almost inaudible.

"MJ," he says, taking a step forward.

"Don't move!" I rasp. "What did you say I was just now?"

"I didn't say –" he responds, weakly.

The tentacle lashes out, snaps madly, crashes down against the floorboards. "You. Called. Me. A. Freak," I grind out, my voice low, flat, no emotion left in it.

Peter looks scared. "MJ, I…I only meant…What Ock did to you, it –"

"I'm a freak to you, now," I say.

"I didn't mean to say that," he protests, almost pleading. 

"I had your baby," I say, loudly, even though I don't know why I'm saying it. "Even though she was dead, she was yours."

Peter hangs his head, biting his lip. "MJ…"

"We even named her after _your_ aunt," I go on, my voice ringing in my own ears. "_Your_ aunt. Not mine."

"Mary Jane, it was just a slip," Peter cries. "I – what he's done to you, MJ, it's monstrous, it's so horrible I just didn't know what to – "

"You've always known what to say before, Peter," I say, and once again, my voice is not mine, my voice-box has been taken over by someone else. "In fact, you're pretty famous for always having something to say. And I've never known you to say something you didn't mean." How can I sound so calm, so logical? How can I speak this coherently even as my heart cracks and crumbles inside me?

Peter takes another step towards me, then stops, his eyes flicking down to the tentacle. I glance down at it, too. I raise my eyes to his, and hold out my arms; the tentacle rises, too, just as I meant it to, stretching itself towards Peter, asking, also, for his embrace.

Peter recoils.

He doesn't mean to, I can tell. But he does.

I don't wait. I burst into a run, a wild dash out of the apartment that isn't ours now, out along the hall that isn't ours now, into the elevator and away. Peter speeds after me, crying out, "MJ! Wait! _MJ!" _I barely hear him, and the last thing I see as the doors close is his pale face, his eyes huge and filled with pain.

You don't love me any more, do you, Spider-Man? 

***

The coat hangs limply from my hand as I walk down the street, my pace slow, heavy, unhurried. I don't care. I don't care that the writhing tentacle is in full view of God and everybody. I don't care that this street, even so late at night, is thronged with people, hundreds of them, who stop to gape, who look sickened, horrified, repulsed. I don't care who sees me or what they think of me. I don't feel anything. I'm encased behind some kind of glass. All I can feel is a vague, gnawing pain, the numbness of a patient under anaesthesia. They all stare. Good. Let 'em. Get a good look, people. Last chance to see the freak show.

I don't know how long I walk, how far, where to. All I know is that I've found an alleyway, cool and dark, littered with trash, amongst which I slump down, my back scraping against the brick wall, burying myself under the garbage bags. I sit there for many long moments, listening to my own breathing, as the car headlights from the street beyond flash and strobe across my face, zebra-striping my bare legs. I lean my head back against the wall, close my eyes. The pain begins to seep through now. It's a hard, metallic thing, in the pit of my stomach, grasping at me, sucking me down. A low, long moan escapes me, and I hunch over, holding my stomach, trying to make this feeling go away.

Peter's gone.

He's gone, made a total stranger to me, in a matter of minutes, of words. That was all it took. All it took for his love to die was a mechanical creation, something that was done to me, something that made me not beautiful. 

Did Peter ever say anything to me, anything complimentary or loving, that wasn't about how I looked? Did he ever tell me he loved me without telling me how beautiful I was? No wonder it's over now. My beauty is gone. And my friends, gone. Peter, gone.

It's over.

I want to cry. I do. But the tears won't come. They're stuck, lodged behind my eyeballs, unable to break free. I fold myself over, still holding my stomach, as though pregnant again, trying to dull the ache within. 

Something strong, and firm, and gentle, drapes itself around my shoulders, wraps itself tightly around me in a hug as fierce as it is protective.

The tentacle. It holds me, close as a snake, its body warmer than I thought it would be. Its claws stroke my hair with almost maternal tenderness, something I would never have imagined possible in an artificial creation. It's sad, I realise. It's sad because I'm sad. 

Ridiculous, because it's just a metal toy, really, just a robotic, mechanical thing, nuts and bolts, wires and circuits. But it feels good, just the same. To be held, to be cradled this way. Loved.

With a sigh, still wrapped in the tentacle's embrace, I pull the coat over myself, and huddle down, shutting my eyes, trying, somehow, to sleep.

My mind fragments, and drifts. My whole body feels as heavy as my eyelids. Finally, finally, I can rest, go and hide in unconsciousness. Somewhere I don't have to think, or feel, or even exist…

And the next thing I know, a voice is echoing through my head, a questioning, authoritative voice, a masculine voice. God, am I never going to sleep again?

I open my eyes, squinting against the flashing blue and red light that invades them. A police car, just outside the alley entrance. Man, silhouetted, standing over me, uniformed, young, pompous. Nasal straight-outta-Brooklyn voice. Cop.

"C'mon, honey, on ya feet," he says, sounding and looking bored. "This city's got anti-vagrancy laws, ya know. Ya gotta find someplace else to sleep f'tonight, 'kay?"

I look up at him through dazed, bruised eyes, my lips parted, only comprehending one word at a time.

"Look, ya deaf?" he says, irritated now, leaning down to pull me up. "I said ya gotta get up and –"

And the nasal, whining sound ceases, as I draw myself up, as the tentacle arches over my head, whirls in mid-air, winds itself protectively in front of me.

"Holy…" is all he can manage.

"I'll just go," I mumble, stepping forward.

In a flash, his gun is in his trembling hand, his legs spread in a dramatic TV cop pose, his eyes wide, face pallid. "Don't move!" he yells.

"What?" I mutter. Oh, Christ. This can't be happening…

"Put your hands in the air!"

Oh, you mean all three of them, Officer?

"Jeee-zus H. Christ…" he whispers, looking me over, before barking out "What are ya? Huh? What the hell are ya? You one'a them mutants or something? Huh?"

"I'm not a –" I try, moving forward again.

He grips his gun so hard the knuckles whiten, his eyes popping. "_I said don't_ _MOVE!"_ he screams, and snatches the radio out of his belt. "Officer Hanley, requesting backup at –"

There's nothing for it, no time to think. The tentacle stretches out and shoves him, hard, harder than I ever could have, back against the brick wall of the alley. While he's in shock, I snatch the opportunity and race past him, out into traffic, speeding lights and honking car horns swirling in a neon haze all around me, filling my eyes, my ears, so I don't even hear his enraged yells, the sound of his gun firing.

I stumble up a flight of stone steps, into the nearest shadowed doorway I can find, pressed up against the frame, teeth gritted together so that the beating of my heart doesn't shatter them. I slam my head backwards against the doorframe, eyes squeezed shut, a terrible, physically agonising sense of futility and rage clouding over my mind. I've spent this whole night, this whole awful night, doing nothing but run. Is there even any point? Where am I supposed to run to?

Where am I supposed to go?

I have to wonder if there's something out there that hears my thoughts, because as soon as I've finished wondering just that, the door behind me creaks open, golden light spills across my face.

I blink, squinting against even this dim light, and against its warm glow I can make out a petite, diminutive shape, stepping forward, a rosary clattering around her slim brown fingers, her dark eyes filled with almost palpable concern.

In hysteria, or relief, or a combination of the two, I burst out laughing. It's the nun, the young Spanish nun I ran away from right at the beginning of my little day-trip to the city. This is the doorway of the mission-house where she works. I'm right back where I started.

Her eyes sweep over me, over my filthy body, shrouded in the horrible coat and the diaphanous hospital gown, over the tentacle that rises, ready to defend me even if I'm not, over my head. And she doesn't scream. She doesn't look disgusted, or horrified, or call me a mutant, or a freak.

"I know you," she says slowly, in a soft Spanish lilt, her head tilting to one side, "I saw you. Earlier. You ran from me. Now I see why."

She moves forward, without haste, raising her arms as if to embrace me. I shy away, a sudden panic rising in me, irrational and stupid, but impossible to ignore.

"Oh, my dear," she murmurs, as if she's talking to a spooked horse, "Don't be afraid. I will not hurt you."

How could she? I've already been hurt beyond repair. The only person in the world who could hurt me has already torn me to pieces. But I say nothing, only eyeing her warily.

"_Mi hija_," the nun says gently, and takes me by the hand. "Everyone is welcome in the house of God. Come inside. There is food here, and shelter. You are safe now. Yes. You're safe."

I gaze into her eyes, her kind, beautiful eyes, and beyond into the warm, light-drenched room behind her. Something in me melts, and I want so badly to believe her, to think that I'm safe, that I could ever be safe again.

A howling of sirens splits the night air, and a pitiless strobe of red and blue slaps us in the face where we stand on the doorstep. I spin around, looking before me helplessly, hopelessly, as three police cars hurtle up to the curb, as three identical cops scramble out, pointing guns at me that look like little more than pieces of black plastic. The nun looks startled, glancing at me in sudden fear.

"Step away from the nun!" screams one of the officers, probably the Brooklyn one from earlier, I don't know, don't care. "Back away from her, and come down here with your hands up!"

I turn to the nun, my eyes beseeching, my arms frozen at my sides. "Help me," I whisper, not even daring to hope.

She shakes her head, lowering it, looking ashamed. "I cannot," she whispers, folding her arms over her chest. "I cannot."

I watch her, watch her blink at the ground, avoiding my gaze. "No," I say, realising the truth of it even as it's said, "You really can't. Can you?"

She says nothing, studying the floor, a faint crease wrinkling her pretty forehead.

I turn away from her, scanning the faces of the cops, twisted in mindless, idiotic hatred, hiding behind their guns.

This is what I can expect now. All I can ever expect from this life. Evil is everywhere. And what good there is, is helpless.

The tentacle is poised at my back, awaiting an order. I close my eyes, raising my hands above my head, exhaling slow and deep.

__

Strike.

The tentacle rises, trembling only slightly through its ascent into the air, high above my head, curving over me like a scorpion's tail. The cops gawp at it, slack-jawed, disbelieving.

__

Strike.

And with a rush of air, a howl of wind slicing through my eardrums like the shrieks of demons, the tentacle plunges down, a black blur of speed and shining claws; it swoops down upon the cops like a bird of prey, smacking them off their feet, sending them tumbling down into the mud and grime. I break out into a run, another run, my millionth run, or maybe the same run I've been engaging in ever since I escaped the house in Arbor Street.

I speed away, splashing through the slime of the puddles, splintering glass underfoot, the cries of the police growing fainter and fainter at my back, and this time, this time, I won't stop. I won't pause. I won't think, or contemplate, or consider my options, because I don't have any, not any more. Everything is gone. My life is gone. My beauty is gone. Peter is gone.

There's only one place left.

One place left for me to go.

***

****

The grandfather clock in the hallway chimes the hour sonorously, announcing the arrival of six o'clock in the morning. Sunrise. The rest of the city awakens, the spell of night is lifted, and the heartbeat of the world returns to its normal rate. People will be having breakfast soon, kissing their loved ones goodbye, getting into their cars, driving off to work. For so many people, not even conscious yet, today will be a day like any other. Nothing at all, in fact, has changed.

I sit on the couch, a mug of steaming coffee clutched in one tentacle, the other twitching the curtain to one side. I have done this so often, watched, through sleepless eyes, the crimson bloodstains that seep inexorably across the New York skyline, dripping down over the buildings, staining the gray concrete. It is a habit I developed a lifetime ago, back at the lab, when I would work there for twenty hours or more, working hard at my research, at my experiments, at eradicating the twin memories of Mother and Mary Alice. Never do I feel so purified, and so empty, as when I watch the sun rise over the world I am no longer a part of.

So distracted am I by the scarlet light that seeps through the window-pane, striking dazzling patterns in the raindrops that still cling to the glass, that I do not hear the soft, hesitant rapping at the front door the first time it occurs. The second time, it is louder, more insistent; it goes on and on, growing increasingly desperate. I get up, set down my coffee mug, and allow my tentacles to carry me over to the door, to unlock it, pull it open.

The street beyond is silent save for the wind rushing through the threadbare treetops, and the streetlamps are beginning to blink out, one by one, as the insidious, naked light of dawn steals across the cracked pavement, the shadows stretching out to their breaking point. 

On my doorstep, she stands. My subject. My example. My girl.

She is covered in dirt and mud, every bare inch of skin besmirched by the stain of the city. One knee is caked in dark, dried blood. Over her hospital gown, she wears an ancient green trench coat so rich with the smell of cigarettes that, every time she breathes, a faint whisper of sulfur emanates from her shrouded form. Though matted and tangled, the sunlight still filters through her red hair, matching it crimson for crimson. 

Her eyes, though, her eyes are what arrests me. They are dull, heavy with numbed anguish. The circles beneath them are so dark, they resemble bruises. Her eyelids are puffy with lack of sleep, drooping low over the orbs, making her look intoxicated. Desperation seeps from her every pore, and her every movement, no matter how minute, bespeaks the terrible pain that has infected her heart. 

She stands there before me, her shoulders hunched, her tentacle trailing, still and unmoving, on the ground behind her. She looks at me, silent, her tired eyes blinking, reptilian in the sunlight. I say nothing, knowing that to speak first would be fatal.

Finally, she swallows, runs a pale tongue along cracked lips, parting them. When she speaks, her voice is softer, older, than it was seven days previously, filled with a controlled despair, an agony held under tightest rein.

"They were staring at me," she says. Her arms, which hung limply at her sides, rise up to her chest, where they clench, convulsively, into whitened fists. "They were _staring_." 

"I know," I say, my voice barely above a whisper. "I know."

She stares at me, eyes enormous in the unfinished light. Then, she topples forward, a floodgate unleashed, and she cries like the first human in the world ever to cry, like Eve cast out of Paradise. She falls heavily against me, burying her face in my coat, gripping onto the lapels as hard as she can, to stop herself from falling. This sudden contact, I admit, takes me by surprise, and my first instinct is to pull away; but, just in time, I realise what a mistake this would be, and am still. I keep my flesh-and-blood arms at my sides, but allow my metal ones to rise, gently, and enfold her, as well as I am able. Even muffled within the folds of my coat, her sobs are lost, hopeless, keening. 

At some point, during that last, long night, a stab of worry entered my heart. I worried that, perhaps, there might be a chance she would not return to me. I worried that she might find herself lost in the city, unable to find her way back. I worried that she might be unable to bear the weight placed upon her, and find a way to take her own life before the evening was through. I worried about all sorts of things.

The time for such needless worry is over.

She is mine.


	5. Last Year's Model

**__**

Freak Like Me

by

****

Santanico

***

Five: Last Year's Model

***

The tick of the clock. The hum of the washing machine. The gentle patter of rain on glass.

The house is silent now.

I sit at the table, cup of tea in one hand, tentacles resting on the shining wooden tabletop. If I narrow the focus of my senses, I fancy I can hear her breathing.

When she had wrenched the last sob out of her shaking body, when she had cried until I felt sure her tear ducts had run dry, she collapsed against me entirely. She was wrung out, had no strength left to stand, nor to resist as my tentacles plucked her from the ground and carried her up the stairs. Removing her coat, I delicately placed her underneath the bedclothes in my parents' room. There she lay, motionless as one dead; I turned to leave, and was startled as a soft, chilled hand shot out from beneath the covers and grasped mine. "Don't leave me," she whispered, in a voice thick with sleep, her eyes not even half open. "Please don't. Everyone's left me. Don't leave me. Please. Stay. Stay."

I paused a moment, looking at her, looking at the limp hand that held mine, and, pulling up a chair, sat down by the bedside. Exhaling, she closed her eyes, let go of my hand. "Sorry I wrecked your window," she muttered, and drifted off to a well-deserved sleep.

I did not move from her side until I was certain she was no longer awake, and allowed my tentacles to carry me, soundlessly, from the room. Since then, I have been checking back on her every hour on the hour; she still sleeps, has not awoken even once to the best of my knowledge. Chances are she will sleep well into the next day, perhaps even the day after that; even disregarding her sheer physical exhaustion, I am certain that this is because some part of her wishes never to wake up at all. Not into a world this cruel. Not into a life this wretched.

The clock strikes noon; mechanically, I get up from the table and head upstairs. She is of course still there, lying unconscious in the shaded gloom of my parents' bedroom, buried beneath the hideous fake-fur comforter that was once a yard-sale folly of my mother's. Her knees are drawn up to her chest, a fetal position, and all I can see of her above the blankets is a closed, translucent eyelid, and a mass of red hair spilling across the pillow. Her breathing is soft, slow, seemingly untroubled. Nothing in the world could wake her. Not until she is ready to be awoken.

Watching her, I wonder what, if anything, she is dreaming right now, what visions project themselves behind those closed eyelids. Perhaps she is reliving the experiences of the last forty-eight hours, scarcely less of a nightmare now than they were when she actually lived them. She has yet to tell me anything of her travails, but then, she doesn't need to: her appearance, and my own memories, fill in every space she has so far left blank. I knew her friends would despise her; I knew that boy's love would wither the second he saw her. Her world has narrowed now to this house, this room, this bed, my shadow in the doorway. Those are all her possessions. Those are all she has left.

I turn and go back downstairs. It occurs to me that, once again, I am left here, alone in this house, waiting for her to come out of herself. I suppose, technically, I could leave her on her own now; she won't wake up for hours, and I believe any potential danger of self-harm to be past. But the sense of urgency, of vague panic and stifling claustrophobia, which ran through me all the previous week seems to have miraculously evaporated. This house only breathes when a woman dwells within it. When there is no one here but me, ghosts stalk its rooms, drape themselves around the furniture, lie in wait at the bottom of the garden. But whenever a woman has been here – be she my mother or this girl – the darkness seems to recede, to fold in upon itself.

So, you see, it isn't that I _need_ to stay and watch over her, now. It's that I don't feel the need _not_ to. If you follow me.

I glance at the clock, and am startled to note that it is nearly ten in the evening. Usually I would be out around this time, stealing through the skyscrapers' shadows, setting plans in motion all over this city, perhaps even being forced, yet again, to deal with the decidedly unwelcome presence of the web-slinger. Yet, tonight, I failed even to notice the lengthening of the shadows, the emergence of the stars; it matters little, however, as the only plan upon which my attentions are concentrated, for the present time, is the one that lies asleep upstairs, in the bed where my father died. Strange to be able to say that my hopes rest upon another person; strange to have to surrender even that infinitesimal amount of control. Stunner, in her darker moods, used to accuse me of being "obsessive" about such things; called me a "typical Aries man", whatever that was supposed to mean.

Stunner. My lost one, last lover. I wonder where you are now. 

Don't think about her.

She's gone.

Stunner is the past. And right now, I have to think of the future. Have to prepare, set wheels in motion. Already they are moving, beginning, slowly yet surely, to grind into gear; thus far, everything is proceeding beautifully well, running as smoothly as a daydream. I almost fear that it can't possibly last, that a plan can only speed along so far before it eventually hits a wall. But this is merely negativism on my part; a knee-jerk pessimism born of a life filled with thwarted designs and disappointment. My other plans, I admit, have failed. This one will not fail.

It will not fail, because she will not fail. 

I stretch my arms out, yawning, blinking slowly. I am far more fatigued than I had realised; hardly surprising, considering I've had no sleep within the last twenty-four hours. Now that she's safely home, I can rest. 

Wearily, I haul myself into the living room, sit down in an armchair as the tentacles begin to arrange sheets and blankets over the cushions of the couch. She'll want to shower in the morning. I'll leave her one of Mother's robes to wear. Then I'll hang her clothes, her jeans, her T-shirt, the trench coat of mysterious and smoky origin, out to dry. Make her some breakfast. Leave it in her room if she doesn't want to come down for it. Then, come evening, I'll go into the city and scout for the locations I believe I will need, to implement the plan's next phase. 

All in all, it's shaping up to be a busy few days.

***

__

The rain rattles the window-panes, howls in the chimneys and through the rusting pipes, but Peter Parker doesn't hear it, doesn't see it. All he sees is the same patch of carpet, its intricate patterning worn thin and threadbare, as he paces over it for the thousandth time. He can't sit still. He's like a shark. If he stops moving, it's all over.

"Do you mean to tell me," May Parker says slowly, seated on the couch, her arms folded over her knees, "That Mary Jane was here? _Only hours ago? And…you let her leave, in such a state?"_

"God, May, I didn't let_ her leave!" Peter explodes, his grief and anxiety finding no other outlet but this elderly woman. "She ran out. She was crazy. He'd driven her crazy. She honestly thought that I…Well, she thought…"_

May looks up, eyes searching. "What did she think?"

Peter stares back down at the carpet. Someone has burned a hole in it with a cigarette. MJ bought it second-hand, lugged it home all by herself. That was in the earliest days of their marriage, when living together in their very own home seemed like such an adventure. MJ, he realises suddenly, bought just about all the furniture they have. There's nothing here that doesn't have her mark on it. Every night he was swinging over the rooftops, twisting, contorting, hurling his body through space, she was here, building their home. If she weren't still alive, he would swear this place was haunted by her ghost.

"Peter? What did she think? What did you say?_"_

May's voice, sharper than usual, brings him back to the awful reality. "I…" he begins, and stops, filled with shame. "Well…I think…"

He sits down. Buries his face in his hands. "Oh, Aunt May. I think I said something really stupid."

"Like what?"

"Like…" He swallows, shuts his eyes tightly against the pain of the memory. "I think I might have said – but May, I didn't mean it, like, against her or anything, I was just so shocked, I didn't know what to say, it – it came out so wrong…" He covers his face again. "Oh, God," he says, voice muffled. "I'm an idiot. I'm such an idiot."

"Peter, just tell me. What did you say?"

He exhales, looks out the rain-sodden window. "I think…I may have, accidentally…I… called her a freak," he whispers. 

May breathes out sharply, closes her eyes. "Oh, Peter," she mutters. "You didn't."

Peter says nothing. What can he say? There's no defending this. He was in shock. He didn't mean it to sound that way. He didn't mean it as an insult against her. How do you express in words all the love, all the grief, all that fury that wells up inside you when you see the thing you love so horribly and callously mutilated? Words are only words. 

Words can drive love away. 

Words can kill love.

May shakes her head, trying to clear it. "Peter, how could you? Didn't you think about what…She needed _you, Peter. More than anyone in the world. I'm sure of it. And then to hear you say such a thing, well, no wonder she ran. I would have done the same."_

"I'm gonna get her back," Peter whispers, to no one in particular. "I'm gonna find her and get her back. I'll take her to the hospital, and they'll remove that…thing. That tentacle. And then I'm gonna take it, and I'm gonna hunt down Ock, and I'm gonna make him eat it."

It is May's turn to say nothing. She is thinking of Doctor Octopus, of the man she once loved, of whom she refused to believe any evil, back in the days when she kept her eyes resolutely closed to any and all she didn't want to see. Her first impulse, even now, is to defend Octavius, even though she knows he is indefensible; to believe that this is all a mistake, that Mary Jane will come strolling in any minute, hale and hearty, undamaged in any way, and all suspicion will fall from Octavius' shoulders like droplets of water. She loved him once. And she knows, despite what her nephew believes, that there is no way to ever truly kill love. It waxes and it wanes, but even when there's nothing left of it but the thinnest, faintest sliver, it never really vanishes into the darkness.

***

****

I awake to the creak of a hinge, a light, halting tread upon the upstairs landing. The light filtering in through the curtains is murky, a watery dark blue. The sun has not yet risen. 

I lie, suspended between sleep and waking, listening as attentively as I can to the noises upstairs. 'Noises', perhaps, being an inappropriate term; she moves so quietly that no one would ever hear her, were they not attuned to her movements as keenly as I. 

Another door closes, with infinite softness. A heartbeat of silence. Then the low hiss of the shower, lurching into life.

In the darkness downstairs, I allow myself a smile.

***

I don't remember waking up. I don't remember getting out of bed or leaving the room, or taking off the hospital gown. All I know is that I'm naked now, and hot water is crawling through my hair, streaming down my skin, pooling on the tiles at my feet. I press myself against the white tiles of the wall, hoping vaguely that their coolness will transfer to me, give me some kind of feeling.

But I don't feel anything.

I guess that's for the best.

****

***

I'm standing in the kitchen, briskly preparing breakfast, trying to remain casual, unwilling, really, to admit to my own excitement. It's full daylight now, the sunlight sliding its glistening fingers over neatly rearranged couch, newly polished dining table, frying pan flipping a pancake dextrously, in the clutches of a gleaming metal tentacle. Life has returned to this house, I feel it, even in my artificial arms; some life-giving oxygen has been restored to what was once an airless vaccuum.

I pretend not to hear her soft, hesitant step on the stair behind me; am careful not to acknowledge the small figure glimpsed from the corner of one eye, standing, looking very lost, in the doorway.

"Whatcha making?" 

I look up, a practised expression of mild surprise on my face. There she stands, her skin clear of all dirt and grime; her red hair still damp, combed back from her pale face; her tentacle wrapped around one leg, its head raised in a quizzical manner, as if looking around; her undernourished frame swimming inside my mother's much larger terry-cloth robe, one bare shoulder exposed, clutching the folds of the white material with one hand in an effort to keep it from falling off entirely. Eyes very green, very large, and utterly devoid of expression.

Wordlessly, I hold up the frying pan.

"Pancakes," she says, as if confirming it to herself. "Can I…Can I have some?"

I nod, and turn back to the stove, one tentacle setting the kettle to boil.

She walks back into the living room, sits down on the couch with an exhalation. She leans her head back, closing her eyes, exposing her white throat. I pause a moment to watch her; she opens her eyes, immediately meeting mine, and I am once again grateful for the protection offered by my glasses, as I look away.

"You have a really nice house," she says. Before I can respond, she's off, speeding away on this train of thought. "I mean, it doesn't look like much on the outside, in fact it looks really awful on the outside, I guess that's what you wanted, huh? But on the inside, you've done it up really nicely, you know, with the couch here and the grandfather clock and that table and all, and it's just really nice, really…nice."

A pause. Before I can think of any kind of response that might be appropriate, she's away again. "And you know something, you have the most kickass bed! I mean it! I mean I don't remember waking up this morning, not the first time anyway, but I must've gotten up because I had a shower, but after the shower I went back to bed for a while and it was so soft and warm, like being in the belly of a great big beast, you know? All furry and safe. I just lay there for ages, staring at the ceiling, wrapped up in the blankets, and I remember thinking, I never want to leave this bed, ever. I mean, I used to have a nice bed, but it's gone now, and anyway yours is way better, and it's just a really great bed, and thank you for letting me sleep in it, 'cause I mean it, it's a great bed."

Treat her normally. Pretend you didn't hear the edge of hysteria in her voice. Pretend that last subject of discussion was not completely inane. "You do seem to have gotten the most out of it," I remark.

"What happened to your face?" she responds.

For a moment I am completely lost. Then, touching my fingers to my cheek, I remember. The scars she left, the day her tentacle's claws scratched me. She doesn't remember. Well, how could she? She may have been physically there, even been the cause, but her mind was miles away from me. "Nothing important," I say dismissively, turning back to the kettle.

"Looks pretty bad, though. A cat scratch you?"

Involuntarily, I smile. "A wild creature. Yes."

"There were cats where I went, when I left. I was in an alley. Stray cats everywhere. And this nun, she was feeding them, you know? Kind of a nice thing to do, I guess. You gotta look after strays, I think. They can only look after themselves for so long, because it's a hard world out there, it's a hard, cold world…"

She trails off, lowers her eyes to the floor, wrapping her arms around herself as if a sudden chill has entered the room. Taking my cue, I pour out a cup of tea and allow a tentacle to set it before her. She takes it, flashing me a grateful look, and sucks it down greedily.

"Thanks," she says huskily.

This is proving more awkward than I had anticipated. "You certainly are in a talkative mood this morning," I say, acutely aware of what a banal comment this is.

She closes her eyes, leans her head back again. When she speaks, her voice sounds more level, more normal, or at least passably so. "I know what I'm saying is stupid," she says quietly "But if I don't keep talking, I'll start remembering." She opens her eyes, hunches back into herself, arms folded around her body very tightly. "All of them," she says, her voice strangled and soft. "My friends. My co-workers. My husband. They threw me away. They were people I thought loved me, and they just threw me away. Like I was trash. Like I was garbage."

Strange, the things that manage to touch you, even when you never mean for them to. It isn't what she's saying, exactly, that gets to me. It's the tone of her voice when she says it; it's the slumping posture that accompanies her words. I honestly don't know whether I would feel anything right now had I not once uttered words in that tone, held myself in that posture. Mere days ago, we were worlds apart. Now, nothing that she is is alien to me.

I fight this feeling down, this unwanted sympathy. It is imperative that I remain objective. She is still, after all, a subject. And the experiment is far from over.

"Peter – my husband – I thought he'd always love me," she is saying, staring straight ahead. "I really did. You know? I mean, there are some people you think you can always count on to at least love you, if nothing else. But he…didn't. He just didn't. He saw me, like this – " She gestures to her tentacle, which is gently replacing her cup on the floor " – And that was it. It was over. Just like that." She snaps her fingers. 

She turns to me, her gaze a lot cooler, calmer than before. "I should hate you," she says quietly. "For what you've done. I really should. When I was lying there, in your bed, watching the ceiling, I tried to hate you, to muster enough energy even for that. But it wouldn't come, and I couldn't force it to. I don't hate you, Octopus. I can't. You're the only one who didn't throw me away."

She gets up, saunters aimlessly around the room, picking things up, examining them, putting them down. "I hated you before, no problem," she says. "But everything's different now. I can't think the way I used to. All I know is, it just feels good to have someone around who knows what this feels like. Even if you were the one who did it to me in the first place."

It takes an effort, a concentrated effort, on my part not to look away; to do so would be to admit weakness. It annoys me that I find this artless confession oddly moving; it annoys me even more that I cannot pretend she has not made it. "I'm sorry you were all alone out there," I say feebly, and am now annoyed with myself, for meaning it.

She shrugs. "Yeah. Well. It was pretty bad. But, you know, it's funny. This thing you gave me, this, uh, this tentacle. It was really sweet to me, actually." The tentacle, sensing its cue, snakes up and curls around her shoulders, like a friendly feline. She smiles, and absently strokes it. "Made me feel a _little_ better, anyway. You know?"

Yes. I know. It was the same for me. When I was out there, in the cold world of which she speaks, isolated, monstrous and alone, my tentacles were the only companions I had. They would hold me when I shook, stroke me when I sobbed. When everybody else wanted only to exploit me or abandon me, all I was left with by way of human warmth was the embrace of metal arms. I talked to them, confided in them, and in return they comforted me as gently as Mother had once done, so long ago. 

Later, I realised that they were in fact merely obeying the orders of my subconscious; they felt no innate affection for me, no genuine compassion. I needed to be held, so they held me. I needed to be taken care of, so they took care of me. Even when I wasn't consciously giving the orders, they were doing exactly as I told them to. 

She will realise that, too, sooner or later. I could tell her now, I suppose. But it isn't the time.

She stretches her arms above her head, yawns, sits down again on the couch. "God, I'm so tired. Why am I still so tired? Must've slept for a year up there…"

"You haven't slept," I remind her "For almost a week." Placing them onto a plate, I pass her a stack of pancakes, a knife and a fork. She grabs them and begins, immediately and ravenously, to wolf them down.

"Are you serious?" she says shrilly, her voice muffled by the food in her mouth. "A week? I don't remember staying up for a week."

"I'm not surprised," I say, turning back to the sink and beginning to wash up. "You were in a semi-catatonic state for much of the time. You didn't eat, either, to the best of my knowledge."

"God. No wonder I'm so hungry," she says, gulping down a bite of pancake. She falls into silence, then, concentrating entirely upon the food, devouring it as a vulture devours carrion. I stand in the kitchen doorway, leaning against the frame, arms folded, watching her. There's a curious fascination in observing her now, where there was none before. Her face is scrubbed clean of make-up, of last night's grit and dirt, and her skin seems to shine in the morning air. The curve of her neck, trailing into the curve of her spine, grading into the curve of the tentacle. It twitches every so often, filled, it would seem, with a nervous energy. She is much less relaxed than she looks. Tension knots inside every muscle, in every sweep of an eyelash, in her elegant, shaking hands. She eats with dogged determination, flooding her senses, trying to escape from thought. I can't blame her. Her future is unknowable. Her past is decimated. Her present lies somewhere between the two. And running through all these dismal backdrops, a scarlet thread of heartbreak.

She is, of course, well rid of that boy. From the instant I saw his gormless image in that photograph, I knew, instinctively, that he was unworthy of her, or at least unworthy of what she had potential to be. She was wasting herself on him, that wide-eyed post-adolescent, so thrilled to be with someone so beautiful, so sought-after. A status symbol, that was all she was to him: proof that he'd _made it_, proof he was somebody. Of course he was repulsed by the sight of her as she is now. The idea of her changing, altering, ascending in any way is and always will be an untenable proposition for the likes of him.

She'll realise that. She will. I want to tell her this. _It hurts now_, I want to tell her. _Yes, it hurts like hell. But it won't hurt forever._

Instead, I stay silent, and watch her as she eats.

She finishes, with a loud clatter of cutlery, and lays the plate down beside her on the couch. Smoothly, one of my arms sweeps the dish away and deposits it neatly in the sink.

"Thanks," she mutters, her eyelids lowered. With a deep sigh, she leans back, closes her eyes again, propping one bare leg up against the coffee table. 

"What now?" she asks, not opening her eyes.

"I suggest you go back to bed," I respond quietly. "You need to save your strength."

Her eyes fly open. "Save it for what?" she says suspiciously.

I smile. She is sharp, now, sharper than she ever was before. Perceptive. Still doesn't trust me entirely, not implicitly. Wary, watchful, on her guard against any possible exploitation. 

I respect that.

"For the days to come," I reply, and leave it at that.

She sits there a few moments, blinking at me, weighing up my statement and trying to make sense of it through the fog of exhaustion still clouding her mind. She gets up, supported by her tentacle, and trudges back up the stairs.

***

After that first morning, he brings me breakfast in bed, every day. Nine AM, like clockwork. Somewhere in the back of my mind, it occurs to me that he's deliberately trying to keep me bedridden, but every time I try to contemplate reasons why, or how I could escape the situation, I immediately feel too tired to care. Besides, wondering how I could escape would imply that I _want_ to escape, which I don't. There's something about being here, curled up in Doc Ock's bed, being brought food and tended to, that reminds me of being home sick from school. I always loved those days, not just because it was a day off, a day away from the real world and all its duties and responsibilities – _screw my homework, screw my household chores, I'm sick today!_ - but because Mom would stay home and look after me, put on some soft music, bring me lots of magazines and cups of sweet tea. I learned that nobody ever pays so much attention to you as they do when you're sick. 

Ock must be reading my mind, because after a couple of days, he brings me some fashion magazines to read, placed neatly beside the plates of food on the tray. That's the only way I know he's been out at all; he's so quiet, most of the time, as if he doesn't want to disturb me. He must've stolen them, but I can't care. I thank him, he nods, and slips out the door. 

I pick them up, flip through them, determined to keep myself idle and disinterested. It isn't possible, though, because on every other page, I see or read about someone I know, someone I saw at that hellish party a few days ago. Here, a byline: _photography by Gerald Cordover_. There, a feature story on Alessandra Georgiano's new collection. Over there, a small photo of Chloe, advertising soap or bath gel or some damn thing. 

I wonder why Ock, who's been pretty considerate up until now, would bring me these things, especially since I'm more than aware of his stance on the media, modelling, and the fashion industry. But then, Ock's nothing if not unpredictable. That's something I've known, second-hand from Peter, for quite a few years now.

Peter.

Every time I think of him, my breath catches in my throat, and a stab of hollow pain hits me right in the gut. Whenever Peter comes to mind, I feel the desperate urge to call Ock back, to talk to him about something, anything, or just to have him near me, so I have somebody else to focus on. I can bear thinking about the others. All I feel when I think of them is a kind of numb rage. But Peter's different. Peter was everything to me. And now that I've lost him, I've lost everything.

Well, everything except Ock, I mean. It's funny. Thinking of Doctor Octopus as something comforting should feel weirder than it does. I know all about him. I've watched on TV, biting my nails, as a live news feed showed me images of him and Spidey, fighting like rabid dogs. I've patched Peter up, snapping joints back into place, helping to set broken bones, after encounters with him. I comforted Gwen after he caused her father's death. I stood by and watched, helpless, as Peter's aunt nearly _married_ him, for God's sake.

This situation is bizarre. I know that. But I just don't care. I needed shelter. Ock gave it to me. I guess it's just as simple as that. And it sort of makes sense to me, that when a hero cast me out, it was his arch-enemy who took me in.

I guess there's something to be said for villainy, after all.

I gaze at the glossy pages of the magazine, at all the pretty faces, most of whom practically spat on me only a couple days ago. You'd never let them talk to you like that, would you, Doc? Never let 'em laugh at you. You're a lot of things, not all of them especially wonderful, but you're no pushover. No laughing stock. Not any more. I bet you'd just seal the doors shut and rip into them. Tear them all into little tiny pieces. Wish I could do that. Wish I could live like you do.

God, what the hell am I thinking? Sure, they're horrible. Scum, even. But they don't deserve that. They don't deserve to _die_ or anything. Nobody deserves to die. I feel ashamed of myself, dirtied somehow, for even thinking that way. Must be the effect of being around Ock so much. You get weird ideas into your head.

Ock comes back a little later, to take the tray. I want to talk to him, not about anything in particular, just to talk to him. "I didn't know you'd been out," I say, waving one of the magazines.

He looks up, but doesn't seem inclined to respond. So I forge ahead.

"You only go to the newsagents', or, uh, did you go anyplace else?" Lame, incredibly lame.

"I stole them from a newsstand last night," he says, his voice as flat as ever, but his tone reasonably polite. "And, yes, I did go elsewhere, too."

"Like where?" I don't care, just keep talking to me.

"Nowhere special." Evasive. "Various places around the city."

"Sightseeing, huh?"

"Something like that."

An awkward silence descends. He doesn't leave the room, senses I want to keep him there, shifts uncomfortably. 

"I have to go," he says brusquely, after a while. "I'm afraid I have business to attend to, Ms. Watson. I'll bring up your lunch at noon."

I wave a hand irritably. "Okay. But do me a favor, forget that 'Ms. Watson' stuff, would you? Just call me Mary Jane. Or MJ. Everybody else does."

He pauses, his back turned to me, then looks pensively back over his shoulder. "You may call me Otto if you wish," he mutters, then, as if slightly embarrassed, hustles out of the room.

***

__

The back door of the mission-house cracks open, a sliver of warm light spilling across the stones of the alleyway. Sister Aileen Guiterrez's appearance is heralded, as always, by the familiar yowling chorus of stray cats, the cats she has come to think of as hers. They greet her affectionately, rubbing up against her ankles, purring like lawn-mowers. She smiles, mumurs endearments in Spanish, as she sets out the evening's leftovers for them to finish off. As she straightens up, she scans the alley, a faint crease between her brows. Every night, now, she wonders whether that girl will be back, the one with the strange black whip, or whatever it was, protruding from her spine. She wonders if she escaped from the cops, and if she deserved to escape. She wonders if she, Sister Guiterrez, could have done anything.

Seeing nothing, she turns to go back inside, when she is startled by a brief, polite tap on the shoulder. "Excuse me, Sister…"

Emitting a tiny shriek, she spins around, and almost collides with Spider-Man.

He hangs before her, upside-down, translucent webbing dangling from the top of the roof opposite, shadowed against the brick wall, the blank white eyes of his mask boring into hers. "Sorry," he says. "Guess I should've just knocked, huh?"

Involuntarily, Sister Guiterrez takes a step backward. "Spider-Man," she mumbles, pressing a hand to her chest, trying to slow her heartbeat. "I have heard of you."

"Well, at least my PR department's doing its job. Listen, it's Sister Guiterrez, isn't it?" She nods. "Well, look, I won't bug you for too long. I've just gotta ask you something. Word on the street is you met someone kind of unusual recently. Well, aside from a guy in a spider costume hanging from a rooftop, I mean," he adds, sheepish.

Sister Guiterrez, realising only now that her mouth has been slightly open since she first saw him, snaps it shut, bites her lip, then speaks, hesitantly. "I did," she says, and lowers her eyes, filled with shame at the memory. "Yes, I am afraid I did. A young woman. She seemed to be…Something seemed to have been…done to her. A long, black object, very thin, like a whip, extending from her back."

He seems to sigh, very softly. "So she was here."

Sister Guiterrez nods. "If she is the one you are looking for, yes. I assume she did not do this thing to herself? It was something done to her, yes?"

"It was_ something done to her, yes." His voice is lower, heavier. _

Sister Guiterrez bows her head. "Mister, um, Spider…you must realise that this is a house that has witnessed many strange things, for it is our business to help those in trouble. She was of most strange appearance, but it is my regret and my shame to admit that I could do nothing to help her. The police arrived only moments after she, and they were shouting, holding guns. I do not know if she was a criminal or not…"

"She's not._" Sharp._

The nun bows her head even lower. "Then I am more ashamed than ever I was before, for I did not help her. I could not tell, sir, whether or not the police wanted her for a good reason. For, you see, she then attacked them."

The eyes on the mask seem to widen. "Are you kidding me? She attacked_ them? Mary Jane?"_

The girl's name, Sister Guiterrez assumes, but says nothing of it, nor does she dwell on how this wall-crawler would know such a thing. "It seemed so. She raised the object on her back, and she lashed out at them with it. Then she ran. This was the last I saw of her. The police questioned me for hours, but I could tell them little more than I have told you."

Spider-Man exhales, looking away. "You didn't happen to notice what direction she ran in or anything, did you?"

She shakes her head. "I am afraid not, sir. I'm sorry."

"Ah, well. I figured it was a long shot…" He trails off, then seems to shake himself. "Well, sorry to bother you, Sister. Thanks for your help. I'll be going now…"

"Spider-Man?" she ventures, uncertainly, as he leaps onto the wall opposite and begins to climb upward. 

He stops, looks back over his shoulder. "Yeah?"

"If you find her," she begins, not really knowing where she's going with this, or why she's saying it at all, "Make sure she is all right. Help her if she is in trouble. And if she still cares to hear it, tell her that I am…that I am very sorry."

Spider-Man pauses a moment, nods once, slowly, then scurries up the side of the building, onto the rooftop, and out of sight.

Sister Guiterrez watches him go. It is an odd thing. The feeling of guilt she has carried inside her for days now should have been lessened by what she has just told him. He is a hero, she knows. If anyone can find a way to help that girl, it is he. She has done all she can to aid him. She really should feel less guilty.

She should. But she doesn't.

She turns, shoulders slumped, and goes back indoors. It is starting to rain again.

***

****

I sleep lightly at the best of times. It is the best way I know of to prevent enemies from getting the best of me, to stop memories from tiptoeing into my dreams. As a child, I could rarely afford a good night's sleep; there was no telling when Mother would need me by her side, an ally in her war against my father. Their screaming, foul curses tossed back and forth through the air, the sharp slam of doors and the sound of a woman's weeping – these were the noises that would summon me from my slumber, send me to sit, silent as a gargoyle, on the stairs, peering through the banisters, heart pumping with anxiety. Deep sleep never became a habit with me, and, considering the eventual course my life would take, this is likely for the best.

When I wake up, I immediately know that it is very late, or very early, depending on how one looks at it. The rain spatters quietly, a constant murmur, against the windows. The furniture in the living room can be made out only as a series of black shapes, rocks in a barren, pre-dawn landscape. The whole world is filled with silence. It is only when I listen closely that I can hear the sound of another's breathing, not far from me; it is only gradually that I can make out a dark shape at the foot of the couch, distinct from the other shapes, the ones that ought to be here.

"Are you awake?" she says, her voice a hushed whisper.

"Yes," I say, whispering too; it feels somehow inappropriate to speak at a normal volume in this eerie, preternatural gloom. "What are you doing up?"

"Sorry," the girl – that is to say, Mary Jane – says, shifting her position a little. She is sitting on the floor, her back propped up against the arm of the couch, hugging one leg to her chest, stretching the other out before her. She has dressed herself, in the jeans and red T-shirt she was wearing the night we met. "I didn't mean to wake you. I, I just…Well, I just had a dream, and I didn't really want to be on my own."

"A nightmare?" I ask, sitting up on my elbows.

"Well…Yeah. Yeah, you probably could call it a nightmare." She hunches closer to her knee, pausing a moment before continuing. "See, there was this girl I used to know. We were friends, sort of. It's a little complicated. See, she and my hus – she and Peter, they were going out at one point, before Peter and I got together. And she, uh, she died."

"I'm sorry," I say, because there isn't anything else to say.

"She got killed. Knocked off a bridge. You know the Green Goblin? He did it. Pretty famous incident at the time. You killed her father," she says, matter-of-factly. "A little earlier."

"I have killed," I say, "A lot of people's fathers." Not attempting to menace her. Merely a statement of fact.

She shrugs, not intimidated in the slightest, nor visibly impressed. "Well. Anyway. She died, I guess that's the important thing now. And, since all this started, I've been having these dreams about her, on and off. The last few nights I've been okay, didn't dream at all. But tonight, it happened again, and I…" She trails into silence.

When she speaks again, her voice is soft, dreamy, deep in reverie. "In the dream, I'm in a house, her house. I mean, it's not really her house, but in the dream it is. I can tell from the paintings on the walls. Some of them are of her, some of her dad. And then there are all these others – me, Peter, Flash Thompson, Harry Osborn, just about everyone I've ever known. I'm standing in the middle of this beautiful house, with plush carpeting and huge flights of stairs, and picture windows and velvet curtains, and I'm dressed in this really tight corset thing with black feathers, like the one I wore at the fashion show. The tentacle is laced back against my spine, and every time it moves against my skin, it hurts me. I've got a flute of champagne, so I sip it, to take the edge off the pain.

"'Love hurts, darling,' a voice calls out above me. I whirl around, and there she is. Gwen. Her name was Gwen, y'know. She's slowly coming down the stairs, wearing my green trench-coat over a black sequined evening gown. It should look awful, but on her it looks great. 'Love hurts,' she says, 'And so does beauty'.

"'Is anybody else showing up?' I ask nervously, looking at the clock in the corner. It says it's quarter to midnight. 'This party isn't going to go so well if it's just you and me.'

"'_Au contraire_,' Gwen says airily, taking my champagne away and having a sip. 'You know, this champagne is so very out of season. What will the neighbors think?'

"'To hell with the neighbors,' I say, more savagely than I mean to. 

"Gwen clucks her tongue, shakes her head. 'Now what have I told you about that attitude? No wonder we're the only ones here.'

"'Will we always be on our own?' I ask desperately, clinging to her arm. Her skin is ice-cold. She smells like incense and caramel, and rot under the fingernals.

"She smiles at me. 'Got to forage for ourselves, sweetness,' she says, prising my hand off her arm. 'Big bad world, you know. I bet that tentacle really hurts under there. You should take it out for some air.'

"'I can't,' I say, pressing my hands defensively against my back, feeling the tentacle squirm.

"She laughs, and begins to head back upstairs. 'Let me know if anyone else arrives, honey,' she says over her shoulder. 'Though if they do, I'll be very surprised.'

"I don't want her to leave me. This panic, this terrible, cold, clammy panic just seizes me, and I try to run up the stairs, but I can't get any further than the first step. It occurs to me that if I use the tentacle, I could lever myself up. So I unlace the corset, it falls off me, and the tentacle bursts out, writhing around, but as I turn around, I see, at the top of the staircase, all these people, the people from the paintings, everyone I know, standing there and staring at me, not moving, not saying anything, like wax dummies, you know? And I'm standing there, my hair all done up, nice make-up, nice jewellery, pretty full skirt, topless, with this tentacle flailing around behind me, and I…Well, I guess that's when I woke up."

She sits there a moment, elbows on her knees, propping up her chin. I don't say anything, waiting patiently. 

"You know what I think the worst thing about death is, Otto?" she says quietly. It is the first time she has ever called me by that name. "It's that you have to go into it alone. There's nobody else you can take with you, not really. After the pain is over, you're just left out there, all alone." She buries her head in her hands. "I'm gonna be just like Gwen," she mumbles. "I'm gonna be all alone."

Silence. Nothing moves in the room as the long moments crawl by, measured on the window in droplets of cool rainwater. I watch her, observe her, try to catch every detail as I would were I looking at an artwork in a museum. The dim light sliding dark fingers through her red curtain of hair. The crook of her fingers, casting slim shadows over her marble face. The C-shaped arch of her back, curled over, and the black tentacle descending from beneath her shirt.

"You aren't alone, Mary Jane," I say, but I don't believe she hears me. 

She sits up with a loud sniff, and self-consciously combs her hair back from her face. "Anyway. Sorry to wake you and all."

"Don't worry about it." A beat. "There's hot chocolate in the cupboard. Would you like some?"

She sniffs again, and nods. "Yeah. That'd be cool. Thanks."

I throw aside the covers, running my fingers through my hair, tucking strands of it behind my ears, straightening the coat in which I have slept. I do not feel comfortable wearing everyday clothing around her, not just yet. I reach over to the coffee table for my glasses, and find them gone; Mary Jane is holding them, turning them over in her hands, examining them, then looks up at me with mild curiosity.

"Huh," she says. "You know, I've never seen you without your shades on before."

I wait, unaccountably tense.

"Your eyes are kind of nice," she says, and hands me the glasses. 

Remain objective. 

***

I sleep for most of the rest of the day, only waking up when Ock – Otto, I mean – brings me something to eat, then immediately dozing off again. My internal clock is shot to hell, but who cares? What does time mean to me now? What have I got to get out of bed for?

I find out some time around early evening. The touch of cold metal on my shoulder shakes me out of unconsciousness. I sit up, rubbing my eyes, until I can focus. Otto is standing in the doorway, showered, dressed, tentacles slowly writhing, one of them sliding away from my shoulder. His arms are folded; he looks purposeful. I, who have no purpose, have to take a moment to recognise that.

"Hey," I say blearily. "What's up?"

"You're still dressed," he says, looking me over. "Good."

"Why good?" I ask, a vague suspicion dawning upon me.

"You and I," he says, swishing a tentacle dramatically. "Are going to have an evening out."

My insides freeze up, gripped suddenly by a terror I know is irrational, but no less powerful for that. I shake my head, drawing my knees up to my chest protectively. "No."

"Come now. You have to leave this house sometime," Otto replies, in a brisk, no-nonsense tone that reminds me of my high school gym teacher.

I shake my head again, burrowing down further into the covers. "I'm not going out there," I mutter. "Don't want to see them. Not again. Not again."

I might be imagining it, but Otto's expression seems to soften, so slightly that someone else might not even notice a change. "I will be with you," he states. "Nothing will happen to you as long as you're with me. No one will even see us. I will make sure of it."

I raise my head, peering over the top of the blanket. He's still standing there, expectantly, patiently. He holds out one of his tentacles, extends its claws towards me in invitation. Maybe it's the tone of his voice, confident, reassuring, as if he really does know how to handle anything and everything that could possibly happen, but somehow, the prospect of being out there – out in the world, _their_ world, where I thought I could never bear to go again – doesn't seem so frightening when I think of him being out there with me. 

I grasp hold of his tentacle's claws, and he pulls me out of bed.

"We'll take the rooftops," he says, businesslike, as I follow him down the stairs. "Less chance of being seen that way."

"By civilians, anyway," I murmur.

He turns around to stare at me, one eyebrow raised. "I take it we are thinking of the same individual?"

"If you're thinking of Spider-Man? Yes."

Otto pauses on the stair, not looking at me. "Are you worried about the prospect of his finding us? Or, perhaps…hopeful?" 

I cast my eyes down, shake my head. Honestly, I don't know. Part of me, one small Pavlovian part that still makes my heart leap when I think of Spidey's name, wants him to find us, wants it very much. It wants life to go back to the way it was, for everything to be normal again, or as normal as life can be when you're married to a man whose DNA is partly arachnid. But every other part of me feels nothing but pain when it considers the idea of meeting up with him again. The memory of rejection, of a breaking heart. No. I can't face that. 

"I just don't want to get caught," I say.

"You haven't done anything," Otto points out, as he continues down the stairs. And I think I hear him mutter, "Yet."

***

****

We head out into the back yard. Mary Jane stands there, barefoot in the wet grass, shivering slightly, looking up into the sky. It's only just turned dark, but already you can make out the faint outlines of the stars.

I turn away, my back to her, and fold my tentacles in front of me. "Climb on," I say, somewhat gruffly, I fear.

She laughs, awkwardly. "Wha-at?"

"Climb onto my back," I say, with controlled patience; already I feel the levels of adrenaline within my body starting to rise, in exquisite anticipation of the evening ahead. Tonight's the night; all my plans will either come to fruition, or wither on the vine. I am aching, absolutely aching, to begin.

And yet, still, she is uncertain. She shies away, looking at me askance. "I, I dunno," she mutters. "I'm still kinda weak. What if I fall off?"

I turn to look at her, calmly, over my shoulder. "You won't fall off," I say simply.

She gazes back at me a few, unbearably long moments. Then, slowly, she approaches. She winds her arms around my neck. I stare straight ahead. Her legs wind around my waist. She holds onto me, securely, tightly.

I can feel her warm breath on the back of my neck, the muscles of her inner thighs pressing against my hips, her breasts crushing against my back. It occurs to me, at this unwelcome moment, that it has been a long time since I have been in such close physical proximity with a woman. A very long time.

Remain objective.

"Ready?" I ask her, my voice husky with cold.

"Ready," comes the meek response.

One of my tentacles shoots out, embeds its claws in the brick of the nearby wall. The second follows suit. My body lifts through the air, skyward; she clings to me tighter, yet her breathing is unchanged. She does not seem frightened. As if she's done this sort of thing before. 

The tentacles carry us up to the roof of my house, crouch, spring. We sail through the air, hit the roof of the next house without a jolt, without a sound. Gathering momentum now. The wind streams through my hair, howls past my face. As her arms around my neck hold tighter still and her legs clamp around my waist, a surge of pride flows through me: I don't believe I have ever felt so strong, so capable. 

We're approaching the city now. I drop down into an alley, scuttle through it, leap up against the brick of the wall, haul us up and over onto the flat rooftop; soaring through the air again, spinning through space, and it's nights like this that I almost feel that everything that was done to me, every appalling indignity that I was forced to suffer, is worth it just for this, this feeling of flight, of absolute freedom, which otherwise I might never have known.

As we go higher, the city spreads out below us, a dotted map of tiny car headlights and minuscule civilians. I'm above them now, in every sense of the phrase. 

We're above them, now.

***

__

It's just like old times, I think to myself as Otto and I whirl through the air, clamber up the sides of skyscrapers, feel the heat and smoke of the city drop away as we go higher and higher. Just like it was with Spider-Man, back in the beginning, before it all got complicated. When it was just him and me, alone together above the world.

If I close my eyes, I could pretend we're back together again, that it's his body I'm clinging to, not Otto's; that he's the one skimming us over the city so effortlessly, so smoothly. That he's the one who's warm, and safe, and there for me. 

I don't close my eyes. 

Otto takes me further into the city than I've ever gone before, into places where Spidey would never take me. Distant sirens shrill in my ears. Down below, I see smashed-up police barriers; people lying in the street, drunk or dead, I can't tell; walls of barbed wire, glinting mercilessly in the dark light; shards of glinting glass; snarling, scarred-up dogs on chains in threadbare backyards. Sounds of rough voices, shouting, screaming, snickering, crying. All so far down below us it might not even matter.

"Here we are," I hear Otto mutter, and before I can ask, we begin the descent.

***

The cars speed through the tunnel, flashes in the night, headlights flickering through the darkness and vanishing like shooting stars. If any of those cars paused for even a second, they might see two silhouettes walking down the side of the tunnel, one thick-set, head held high, four stalk-like tentacles carrying him down the road; and behind that shadow, a smaller one, trudging along on foot, a thinner tentacle curling from the centre of her back, looking quizzically over her shoulder.

"Okay, I'll bite," I say, shielding my eyes from the bursts of dazzling light that emerge every so often from the tunnel. "What are we doing here?"

Otto turns around, the lights glinting off his lenses, a half-smile on his face. "You know, Mary Jane," he begins, in a lecturing tone, "One of the interesting things about these appendages with which you and I find ourselves having to soldier through life, is that, like every other limb, they require exercise if they are to adequately respond to our commands. To gain full control over them, we must flex them as often as possible."

"That didn't really answer my question," I grumble, stepping around the hundredth piece of broken glass.

" Surely you've noticed," Otto says sharply, "That the tentacle does not always do what you want it to do, when you want it to do it?"

I shrug. "Yeah. I figured it kind of had a mind of its own…"

"Wrong. You control it, but you do not know how. The only way to gain the upper hand, so to speak, is to consciously command it, repeatedly and rigorously, until you no longer need to even make such commands."

"Not following."

"When you pick up an object with your hand, your flesh-and-blood hand, do you need to actually _think_ 'Pick it up'? No. You simply reach out, and take that which you want. You must learn to do the same with the tentacle. Only more so. Use it correctly, and every door in this world will open before you. No one will deny you anything. Flex this new muscle, and the world will cower in your wake."

I frown. "That, uh, doesn't sound like something I'd be interested in, Otto. No offense or anything."

"Whether you are interested or not makes no difference to me, Mary Jane. Whether you want to or not, you will eventually use your tentacle on another person."

Thinking of the way I had to lash out at those cops days earlier, I shudder. "I wouldn't do that."

Otto raises an eyebrow. "So if it came down to the choice between your own life and that of an anonymous civilian, you are sincerely telling me that you would choose the civilian?"

"That's right," I say stubbornly.

Otto is silent for a minute. Then: "We'll see," he says simply, and, with an almighty swipe of his tentacle, he shoves me out into the middle of the road.

I spin around, dazzled, confused, reeling from the blow, my senses suddenly overloaded. A horn bellows, deafeningly loud, in my ears; I twist around; lights explode into my eyes, bright and painful as the sun, and behind those lights a truck, a hundred-tonne metal and steel behemoth, bears down upon me with a speed that belies its gargantuan size.

No time. To move, to think. I scream, cover my head with my arms; the truck roars toward me; my tentacle shoots out, extending itself longer and further than ever before, damn thing's longer than my whole body; it sweeps out in a massive arc, smashes across the front of the truck, throws it to one side. It skids down the tunnel on its side, bright blue sparks flying over the asphalt; cars swerve frantically to avoid it, horns scream all around me, brakes squeal like dying animals. The truck skids to a stop, collapsing against the side of the tunnel; traffic has completely stopped, now, people leaping out of their cars, staring wildly around, some helping the truck driver, pale and shaking, out of his cab.

I stand there in the middle of the road, arms still raised, quivering in shock. I stare in fascinated horror at the chaos that has ensued all around me. My tentacle lashes and whips in the air, twitching with nervous, aggressive energy.

"I did this?" I whisper, looking around the tunnel, brought totally to a standstill.

"Yes," says Otto, standing beside me; I didn't even notice he was there. "And you'll do more. But not here. We must leave."

It's only as I follow him out of the tunnel, onto the grass embankment outside, that I begin to recover my senses. I whip around, snatch at his coat, and haul him practically nose-to-nose with me. He displays no particular reaction to this. "You _shoved_ me out in _traffic!_" I snarl. 

"I did," he says calmly.

"You could've _killed_ me!" I cry.

"Very possibly."

"And – and all those people! In all those cars! That, that truck driver! You made me – the tentacle – I had to – you –" I realise it even as I say it: "This was some kind of test, wasn't it? Goddamn you, this was a test!"

"Yes," he says coolly, pulling away and straightening his coat. "And you passed with flying colors. Congratulations."

"Congratu – Congratulations?!" I sputter. "You son of a bitch, I –"

I fly at him with a fist; he catches it in the claws of one tentacle without even batting an eyelid. He holds me that way for a while, looking me dead in the eye, until I stop struggling and am forced to gaze back at him. "Please don't call me names like that," he says softly, and lets go. I stand there, scowling, rubbing my wrist. He watches in silence, before speaking again.

"I hope you understand, Mary Jane, that this was necessary. I was not trying to hurt you, or kill you. I had no other motivation than to help you. You will be called upon to make similar split-second decisions, to act rather than think, in the future. You are at least now somewhat prepared for this eventuality. You know something now of your own reactions. You also know that morality, under pressure, does in fact mean very little."

I don't say anything. I rub my wrist slower, look down at the grass. I don't want to admit to anything. I don't want to admit that being in the middle of that road, staring death in the face, made me feel alive for the first time in days. I don't want to admit to that fierce feeling of power that spread through my body when I saw the damage I had done, little ol' me. I don't want to admit to it. But somehow, I think Otto already knows.

He turns around again, waits patiently. I climb back on without a word. The claws of his tentacles dig into the outside of the tunnel, clamber over the curving roof, and once again, we're off. 

After a while, the buildings begin to thin out; there are more vacant spaces, less noise, less traffic. We're moving out past the city limits, I realise. I cling to him tighter. I'm afraid of where he might be taking me, but I'm even more afraid to be left alone.

****

***

It must be past midnight when we finally touch down in the wrecking yard. I followed the railroad tracks, just as I had a couple of nights previously, when first I found this place, this ideal place. The crushing machinery stands, silent and stilled, against the night sky. For what seems like miles around, stacks upon stacks of murdered automobiles stretch ahead of us, compacted against one another in towers of crushed metal. Strands of police tape flutter, forlorn streamers, in the wind.

Mary Jane slides off my back, stands, looks around, arms wrapped around herself to keep out the rising chill.

"What do you think?" I ask indifferently.

"I think you've got a really interesting 'car' motif going for this evening," she says, the flippancy of her response failing to hide her raw, twisted nerves. "What are we supposed to be doing here?"

I shrug. "I thought you might appreciate a place like this," I say, wandering a little further afield, gazing up at the stacks of broken, useless cars. "I've always found something rather poignant about wrecking yards, myself. These cars, in their chrome coats of purple, blue, yellow. This year's model. Built to be prized. Built to be seen. Built to be envied.

"For a while, they're the owners' pride and joy. Tended to with, oh, such loving care. Buffed and waxed and polished to perfection. Tuned and oiled, kept safe in a warm garage, purring with contentment. And everyone in the neighborhood who doesn't have one, wants one.

"But the seasons change. This year fades into the next. And the companies, the media, launch a new line. These models are state-of-the-art. Faster. Sleeker. More beautiful than the last. Last year's model, you see, is _last year's_ model. And the only model that counts is this year's model.

"And so the cars, those faithful machines that were once so envied, so coveted, so beloved…they find themselves here. Smashed. Crushed. Compacted. Turned from top of the line to bottom of the heap in the space of a season. Nobody would want them now. They're useless. Twisted. Ugly. 

"This is where dreams end, Mary Jane," I finish, throwing my arms wide, taking in the vast expanse of broken machinery. "This is the graveyard of love. This is where Beauty comes to die, alone and unwanted, hiding her face from the world, for no one would ever forgive her for the unpardonable sin of ugliness."

Mary Jane has gone very still. I stride up to her, look down into her pale face. "They will never forgive _you_, Mary Jane. Oh, no, never. You are a traitor to their ranks, you see. You were beautiful, and now you are not, not by their standards. You are no longer their impossible goddess, the figurehead they gaily exploited, fed off, lusted after; now you are changed, and now you are despised."

I'm trying not to listen to him. He's wrong. He's got to be.

He isn't wrong.

Chloe. Laughing with me after the Georgiano fashion show. Screaming abuse at me in her apartment.

Chloe hates me.

"Oh, of course, you did everything right," I continue, circling around her, moving imperceptibly closer. "You smiled at all the right times, at all the right people. You posed as they asked. You wore the clothes they wanted you to wear. Do as you're told! Be a good girl! Be a nice girl! Smile! Follow our rules, and we'll grant your every wish. But disobey, and we will excommunicate you."

Turn to the right, honey. Turn to the left. Flash. Click. Flash. Click, click, click. Could you wet your lips, sweetie? Could you take your top off for me? Could you lose a little weight before the next shoot? Don't forget to smile for me.

Mom. Smile for her. Be good for her. If you don't, she might stop loving you, like Dad did. Don't be sad in front of her. Smile.

"You gave them everything. Your heart, your mind, your soul. You became a puppet, a thing that exists only to be manipulated, to dance according to another's whim. And when your strings were cut, were they there to pick you up as you fell? No. Not one of them. They promised you love, in exchange for your self. But where was love, Mary Jane? Where was love?"

Where was love?

Not in my childhood home. Not in Uncle Frank's house. Not in boozy party scenes. Not under the glare of a photographer's light. 

Not with Dad. Not with Gayle. 

Not in the streets of New York. Not in Chloe's apartment. Not in Gerald's fashionable warehouse party. Not in the mission-house.

Not with Peter.

Not with Peter.

Peter, recoiling from the tentacle. Peter, mouthing the word 'freak'. Peter, turning away from me. 

I sat and waited for him. Night after night. Understood. Wasn't angry. Wasn't resentful. He had to do what he had to do. Be supportive, MJ. Don't get sad or angry. Don't be selfish. Be a good wife. Sit. Stay. Good spouse.

Where were you, Peter? 

Where was love?

****

I lean in close, so close my lips almost graze her ear. "What's wrong? Don't tell me you're becoming _rebellious_ all of a sudden. You have rules to follow, my girl, and don't you ever forget it. You're not beautiful any more, so never labor under the delusion that anyone wants to see you, wants to hear what you say, considers you of any value whatsoever. It's time to creep off to the wrecking yard, Mary Jane, time to hide yourself away from the world, to wait until you wither, until you rot. Nobody wants you any more, you see. You're unfashionable. You're obsolete. You," I whisper, "Are last year's model."

Rip them. Tear them. Gouge them. Break the wine glasses and shove them down their pretty throats. Paint the walls red with their blood, tear out their hearts. Kill them all dead, kill them all…

Mom. Dad. Gayle. Frank. Gerald. Chloe. Alessandra. 

Gwen.

Peter.

Peter.

Peter.

A scream tears from my throat, shreds through my vocal chords, an alien, animal thing, boiling up from inside me, white-hot, blinding. The rage of twenty-five years, twenty-five years of bastards and bitches, of bile choked down, of hate bitten down upon like a spiteful tongue; the rage of centuries, the rage of a world of denied ugliness, the rage of the thrown-away, of last years' models.

The scream doesn't seem to die out, only gathers momentum as it goes on; only builds in primal strength as I reach out with my tentacle, snatch up a car as if it were light as a toy, and shred it to pieces with my shining claws; hurl it into the darkness, grab another one, twist it like a rag, fling it away; smash the tentacle down across windshields, glass streaming into the air in great glittering arcs; raise it again and smash it across hoods, bonnets, trunks, shredding, tearing, ripping to pieces, destroying.

Finally, after eternities pass, the scream dies in my raw, aching throat; all around me, in the world returning at last to my sight, the cars, already broken, are now decimated beyond any hope of repair. All the strength in my body seems to evaporate like steam; I sink down to my knees, arms hanging limp at my sides, my breathing heavy and ragged.

Otto stands, a few feet away, arms folded, head cocked to one side in an analytical manner.

Wrapping my trembling arms around my body, I begin to laugh.

I used to wonder, back in my old life, why so many supervillains seemed to enjoy laughing aloud at inappropriate moments. Since nothing they were doing seemed to me intrinsically hilarious, I concluded they were crazier than outhouse rats, and left it at that.

But that's not why they laugh. I know that now.

They laugh for the sheer joy of it. They laugh because there's no feeling in the world, in the whole world, like the feeling of destroying something, of mutilating beyond redemption, and of the total and absolute freedom an act like that grants you. All the doors are flung open; nothing is denied. Everything is allowed. There aren't any borderlines any more. There's nobody to tell you to stop. Once you're a destroyer, you're everything in the world.

That feeling is indescribable. It's pure light. It's what everyone in this world is striving, scrabbling, climbing over each other to reach.

It's definitely something worth laughing about, that's for sure.

I'm still laughing when Otto makes his way over to me, when he raises me up and wraps his metal arms around me, stroking my hair.

"I am very proud of you," he murmurs.

And that's when, still laughing, I burst into tears.

Because no one's ever said that to me before.

***

__

The following videotape was delivered to all major New York City news stations at approximately nine AM, Monday morning:

A flicker of static. Then, an image. A tight shot of a girl, seated in a comfortable armchair. Dressed casually, green trench coat, red T-shirt, blue jeans, wide belt. Fierce green eyes, slitted, the force of their venom startling even through the medium of a grainy camcorder. One leg thrown over the arm of the chair. Her posture, pose, laid-back and unconcerned. The pose of a conqueror.

"Hello there, New York," she begins, her voice describable only as an intense drawl. There's power lurking behind that unstudied tone, a power nobody law-abiding would even want to contemplate possessing.

"Perhaps you remember me, though I personally wouldn't put money on it. The name's Mary Jane Watson. I'm a fashion model. Well…" A low, filthy snicker. "I used_ to be a fashion model."_

***

Otto dips my head backwards, into the basin, as if I were being baptised. When I emerge, when I dry my hair, it has gone from cherry-red to pure, raven's-wing black. It makes my face look hollowed-out, unhealthily pale; my eyes are startling, scary, against this color. It's too harsh, too severe. It doesn't suit me at all.

It's perfect.

***

__

"See, I've been undergoing a few changes lately. Approaching life from a different point of view, you might say. I won't pretend it's been easy. Oh, no. Far from it. There's nothing easy about learning who you can trust, who deserves you and who doesn't. I've been thinking a lot, lately, about people, and what they deserve…"

***

Otto advises me that, until I'm entirely comfortable with the idea that the tentacle is a part of me, I should give it a name, just to familiarise myself with it. I name mine Brenda. She's got a 'Brenda' kind of feel to her.

__

***

"Of course, I know what you're all thinking. You think I've been manipulated into making this tape by my quote-unquote 'captor', a man you all know as Doctor Octopus. Well, I'm here to tell you, unequivocally, for the record, that I have not been coerced, threatened, or abused in any way. I am making this statement of my own free will. And that statement, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, is as follows…"

***

I slip into the green trench coat, feel it rustle around me, the only remnant of its smoky odor the faint whisper of brimstone. I feel it's rather appropriate.

***

__

"…This society, this wonderful, fair and free and equal society, threw me away, horrified and disgusted, when it saw what it was that I had become. Well, all you decent, upstanding ladies and gentlemen who count yourselves as part of that society, I can promise you this…" The girl leans forward, a sharp-toothed grin spreading across her lovely features. "…You ain't seen nothing_ yet."_

***

****

When we post the tapes at midnight, standing alone on the deserted street in front of the mailbox, Mary Jane watches them disappear through the slot with a wistful expression on her face.

"I wonder what kind of reviews I'll get," she says. 


	6. Ugly As Sin

**__**

Freak Like Me

By

Santanico

**__**

Six: Ugly As Sin

__

Monday, Eight PM.

****

It's all happening so fast.

These are the words that flash, unbidden, into my mind this fair evening, as we speed towards our destination - towards, indeed, our destiny. The stars overhead, visible through the open sun roof of the limousine, whirl past, and it seems to my heightened senses that there are more of them in the heavens than ever before. I sit behind the wheel, struck by this sudden and alien thought.

It's perfectly true, of course. When I take a step back and examine the situation with a cold and clinical eye, I am forced to conclude that everything is indeed happening much too quickly. Only four scant weeks ago, Mary Jane was nothing like she is now. Four weeks ago, I was entirely alone in the world. And then, this sudden freefall. The ground giving way underfoot. If our relationship were not firmly in the realm of the Platonic, you could almost call it a whirlwind romance.

Instinct nags at me, even now, even as the experiment is about to reach its apotheosis. It tells me that anything that happens this swiftly - any conversion this rapid - is not to be trusted. It is built on such a tenuous, fragile foundation. As are all hopes, all dreams.

But in the balmy, serene night air, in the awareness of the warming presence in the back seat of the car, and in the waves of adrenaline that flood through my body, it seems almost churlish even to consider such things. I determine that I will ignore this nameless dread, this premonition of doom. It is merely nerves. That's all. So much is riding on the success of this evening's endeavor, it is, after all, only natural that I should be nervous.

My reverie is abruptly cut short by Mary Jane, her small, lithe body slamming up against the back of the driver's seat. As she grins at me, her teeth glint dangerously in the moonlight, the edge of a knife-blade; the red glow of the stop-light I ignore flashes momentarily, an infernal haze, through her glossy black hair, across the shiny surface of her eye-patch. "Hey," she greets me. "Missed you back there."

I make a non-committal sound in reply.

"They've got champagne in here," she says, folding her arms over the back of the seat, as her tentacle (I refuse to call it by that asinine name) extends itself smoothly towards the radio. "In a big silver bucket full of ice. I thought about having some now, y'know - give the evening a little more of a kick," she giggles, slightly maniacally. "But then I figured, this is gonna be enough of a kick by itself, right? Not exactly the best strategy to go in there tanked up. Besides, there'll be time enough to celebrate after it's done."

Her tentacle snaps the dial on the radio, flicking from station to station. Finding nothing of interest, she scowls. "_Never_ anything good on the radio these days..." she mutters, and returns to the back of the car, where she slumps down across the wide leather seat, tossing her hair, one arm flung lazily behind her head.

Watching her in the rear-view mirror, I find it a lot easier to obey my mind's command to relax. I can even allow myself to smile. Everything is going according to plan. And tonight, this very night, is the night she will finally prove herself.

To all of them.

__

That same Monday, Eight A.M.

"Okay." Robbie Robertson taps his pencil against his teeth, leaning back in his chair. "What about that homeless shelter downtown? The one that's being herded off the premises by real estate developers?"

J. Jonah Jameson snorts, chomping down on his cigar, shaking his head emphatically. "Bleeding-heart hippie trash."

"The Mayor's speech on water pollution?"

"Oh, that's_ real thrilling."_

"The Georgiano fashion show this evening?"

"What do I look like, the editor of Vogue? 'Sides, that's tomorrow's story."

Robbie throws up his hands in despair. "Okay, J.J., you got me. I admit it. There's nothing even remotely interesting in the news right now, certainly nothing meriting the kind of big fat shrieking headlines you live for. Satisfied?"

"Far from it." Jameson slumps back in his chair, arms folded in disgust. "Honestly, in a city full of mutants and freaks, you'd think something interesting would be happening every other week. Instead, we're sitting here, reduced to - to - water pollution, fashion shows, and real estate developments!" He sighs, spinning his chair around to gaze out the office window, into the azure-blue, irritatingly peaceful sky. "I ask you, Robbie - whatever happened to the time when a newsman could always rely on a good old-fashioned lunatic with weirdo powers and a Napoleon complex to try and take over the city?"

Robbie shakes his head in mock sorrow. "Those were the days."

Jameson spins back around. "Hey, what about the Doc Ock breakout? Any news on that? That nutjob usually has something big up his sleeve," he says hopefully.

Robbie shakes his head. "De nada._ Wherever he is, Octavius is keeping a low profile. Unusual for him, I guess, but there you have it."_

Jameson grunts in disappointment, and, without much hope, turns to the 'In' tray on his desk. "Mebbe there's something new just come in..." he mutters, sifting through the unpromising contents, slitting open a letter here, unfolding a pamphlet there.

From beneath a fall of white paper, a package, small, compact and neat, falls out. Wrapped in plain paper. No return address.

Jameson picks it up, examines it critically. "'Nother mail bomb, you think?" he asks Robbie, waving it before the other man's eyes.

Robbie shrugs. "Never know your luck."

Jameson gingerly unwraps the package. A videotape, and that's all. No accompanying note of explanation. Not even a label.

This piques Jameson's attention.

Eyes narrowing in interest, he turns the tape over in his hands, puffing quietly on his cigar. Then the verdict: "Mnh. Probably nothing. But could be something. Robbie, get that TV and VCR over from the corner, willya? Let's give this baby a whirl."

"It's probably just more amateur crop-circle footage," remarks Robbie, wheeling the television over to stand before Jameson's desk. "And there's no way in hell I'm gonna be looking into that kind of crap. Not again."

"Hey, it sold papers, didn't it? Hook it up."

Robbie takes the tape, slides it into the machine, and presses PLAY.

A flicker of static. Then, an image. A girl.

"Hello, New York..." she begins.

The tape plays on. One minute. One minute twenty. Two minutes, three.

By the time five minutes have elapsed and the picture has disintegrated into a storm of static, J. Jonah Jameson and Robbie Robertson are sitting motionless, mouths ajar. Jameson's cigar has tumbled from his bottom lip, and now resides, unnoticed, on the floor, in a pool of its own ash.

"Robbie," he finally says, faintly. "Was that, by any chance, the missing model?"

Robbie swallows, closes his mouth, and nods.

Jameson clears his throat. "And was my imagination running away with me, or was the gist of that speech something along the lines of her having joined up with Doctor Octopus?"

Robbie nods again, licks his lips, then slowly says: "So. I'm thinking this is our headline for this afternoon?"

"This afternoon, hell," Jameson says. "We're stopping the presses right this second."

_ _

Nine A.M.

It's on every channel, Peter realises, as he stares at the television with numb horror. CBS. NBC. FOX. On every station, beaming into every home in New York and probably beyond, she is there, mouthing those words, that look of hate in her eyes.

Octopus. It's his doing, all of this. He's poisoned her. Peter's mind forms these words with a strange and eerie calm, a calm that prevents him from giving way to a universe of panic and despair. MJ might say that Ock hasn't coerced her into this, but Peter is sure - No! He knows - that that isn't true. She's been brainwashed. Manipulated. She doesn't mean a word of it. None of this is her fault.

Peter's fault, maybe. Peter's fault...

He shuts his eyes tightly, squeezing them until spots of colored light dance behind the lids. Even here, in the dark, away from the television images, the sickening ache of guilt throbs in the pit of his stomach; her voice, with its quiet, deadened menace, still insinuates its way into his head.

Peter buries his face in his hands, just as the telephone rings. He doesn't pick it up, lets the machine get it, has no desire to hear the commiserations and concern of others.

"...Peter? Oh, God. Oh, God. It's - it's Chloe, Peter. I just saw the news. Oh, Peter, if you're there, pick up, please." She's crying, sobbing so hard her words are barely distinguishable. "It's all my fault. It's all my fault. If I hadn't been so - I just didn't know what to - my friend_, and I - oh, I'm so sorry. I'm just so sorry. I'm so sorry."_

She hangs up. Almost as soon as she does, the phone rings again.

And again.

And again.

The whole city, it seems, is trying to reach him now.

"Peter, I saw the news. You know. About Mary Jane..."

"Mr. Parker? I'm calling for Channel 6 news. It's about your wife..."

"Peter? Peter, please call me back. I'm just so worried about her..."

About her.

Ten AM.

****

They have descended on her, like the pack of wild dogs they are.

I flick from channel to channel, perched on the edge of the couch, scanning the frequencies for all I can glean of the press' reaction to her little performance. Her name adorns every anchor's salivating lips; her history, and mine, now inextricably bound together, are repeated unto infinity. The media jackals have scented fresh carrion, and every last one of them now wants to sink their fangs into a piece of my girl. Let them. Let them sniff the blood in the air; let them draw closer, ever closer, and when they finally realise that they have drawn too close, she will already have buried her teeth in their necks.

Mary Jane herself is still, as yet, unaware of the explosion she has detonated across this clear and perfect morning. She sings in the shower, now, belting the lyrics out without a trace of self-consciousness. She has built up quite a repertoire, though it does not, thank God, include "Chapel of Love". _"If they don't like him that way, they won't like me after today..."_ she sings. _"He's a rebel and he'll never ever be any good - he's a rebel 'cause he never ever does what he should..."_

In actual point of fact, it must be said that her voice is really rather pretty.

The roar of the shower fades and dies; a brief aria of dripping water; the door to the bathroom is flung wide open, and Mary Jane strides down the stairs, body wrapped in one towel, vigorously drying her newly-dyed hair with another. Steam follows her out of the bathroom in a flower-scented mist, drifts from the surface of her flushed skin. She catches sight of me, and greets me with a dazzling smile. "Good morning!" she carols, flinging herself down on the couch beside me, throwing aside the towel and allowing her wet hair to tumble across her bare shoulders. "Isn't it a gorgeous day? I mean, really gorgeous? I opened the bathroom window this morning, before I got in the shower, and the sunlight just poured through, into the shower stall, flooding into my eyes and over my skin. It lit up all the drops of water. Made it look like I was covered in gold beads. And I just thought to myself, 'Well. I deserve as much, don't I?'" She laughs, leaning back and tossing her hair, sending droplets of cool water cascading across the back of the couch. "Well, anyway. What's the scoop? Are we on yet?"

"Oh, we are," I assure her, flicking onto a live news channel. "We are most definitely 'on'."

She leans forward, resting her arms on her knees, staring avidly at the screen, lips slightly parted in anticipation.

"...Our top story for this morning," the shellack-haired female news anchor is droning, "The resurfacing of missing fashion model Mary Jane Watson, in an alarming videotaped statement implying that she may now be in league with notorious criminal mastermind, Otto Octavius, alias 'Doctor Octopus'. As we speak, the tape is sending shockwaves through New York, the fashion world in particular..."

(Mary Jane snorts derisively.)

"...Here in the studio, we have Dr. Carl Lewisham, former FBI profiler, who's here to give us his thoughts on the tape and its implications. Dr. Lewisham?"

"Yes, thank you, Anne," says the world's most pompous-looking little man, bald, with horn-rimmed glasses, "Personally, I think we may all be leaping to conclusions here, most of them completely unfounded. While I don't believe the tape is staged, I think it's entirely possible that Ms. Watson is in fact, despite her statement, being coerced. Doctor Octopus - if he is in fact behind this - has a history of manipulating people, particularly women, according to his designs..."

(Mary Jane cries out indignantly, and I, although acclimated to such slurs by now, almost have to resist the urge to do the same.)

"I mean, honestly," Dr. Lewisham says, snickering a little, the toad: "Are we to believe that a, a _fashion model_ could conceive of a plan terrifying enough to place the whole city in jeopardy? I've met a few models, Anne, and frankly, I'd be surprised if this one knows how to jump-start a car, let alone -"

(His last few words are obscured by the sound of Mary Jane hissing "You condescending little _bastard!"_ at the screen.)

"But Dr. Lewisham," interjects Anne, listening into her ear-piece, "How do you then respond to the reports we've been receiving that Watson has undergone some kind of physical augmentation?"

A pause. "Augmentation?"

"Of a type apparently similar to that of Dr. Octavius himself," replies Anne. "These reports are as yet unconfirmed, but surely if this is true, then we are perhaps facing a genuine crisis?"

Dr. Lewisham pales. "I - I, well, I," he stutters. "Well, yes, if that's true, which it might - similar to Octavius, you say? Well, then, that - that would change my opinion, yes. Then we would be facing - but, as you say, it might not be true. No. It might be mere rumor. I'm sure it is. Mere rumor."

Mary Jane bursts out laughing, falling back onto the couch, flicking the television off. "Oh my _God_. They're absolutely _terrified!_ They've got no idea, no idea at all...Otto, we've gotta celebrate!" she declares, leaping to her feet. "We got any booze around here?"

I cast her a stern, reproachful look. "It's half-past-ten in the morning, Mary Jane."

She gazes back blankly, then shrugs. "Oh. Well. Whatever you say, then."

"Besides," I state, rising to my feet, "This is far from the time for celebration. We still have a great deal of work to do."

__

Eleven AM.

Naïve at best, Peter chastises himself. Stupid at worst.

Stupid to think that if he arrived late at Midtown High School, he would be able to avoid the attention. Stupid to think that the media wouldn't have clued in to his relationship with MJ approximately five minutes after the story broke. Stupid, really, to leave the house at all.

But then,_ says a mean little voice in his head, _doing things the stupid way seems to be your automatic default plan lately.

__

Peter shoves this voice into a compartment of his mind where he doesn't have to listen to it, and peers cautiously around the corner, unknotting his tie. Beyond the faded red bricks, he can see them all, standing on the school steps, clamoring to be let in. Some of the more tenacious cameramen are even attempting to clamber through the windows. All around, kids are staring, making no real effort to enter the building, highly entertained by this impromptu circus. A couple of them even leap in front of the cameras, making goofy faces and waving. The more aggressive reporters have cornered some of Peter's students, and from here, he can make out snatches of conversation:

"…Mister Parker?" Alice is saying hesitantly. "No, I don't think he's in today. Least I didn't see him."

"It's about his wife, right?" Loralee, gossipy and eager. "Yeah, I saw it on TV this morning. An' like everyone's talking about it. I couldn't believe it, y'know? I've seen her like meet him outside the school and stuff, she was real pretty. Seemed kinda nice. Hey, do you really think she's hooked up with…?"

Et tu, Loralee?_ Peter thinks gloomily, as he quickly sheds his suit, the drab outer layer concealing a riot of blue and red. The briefcase clicks open: out with the mask, in with the suit, and Spider-Man makes his exit, slipping unnoticed up the side of the wall, onto the gabled school rooftop, and away._

Keep moving. Don't stop. If he stops, it's over; if he stops, he knows, the incipient despair will seep into his bloodstream, paralyse him. The city spins below him, a blurred collage of color and sound: somehow it's all so remote, now that she's not in this world with him.

__

Twelve PM.

****

"Let me put to you a question: what is revenge?

"There are a million cliches that attempt to explain it. The most popular theory is that it is a dish served cold. Most will tell you that it solves nothing, only deepens the wound, is nothing more than a snake eating its own tail.

"Personally, I believe it is a fuel. An energy source. A well that, however often one chooses to tap it, miraculously never runs dry. It is the last, glittering, blood-red jewel in the possession of those who are poorer than poor, those who have lost everything else. It is heat and light. It can illuminate your path. If you let it, it will show you your way.

"But I already know what my thoughts on the subject are. What about you? What are Mary Jane Watson's thoughts on revenge?"  
Here, in the echoing gloom of the basement, lit by a single naked light bulb, her features stand out as sharp and bleached as those of a skull. In this raw yellow light, she stands before me, stripped to the bone, her eyes nothing more than black pits beneath the shadows of her hair. Sweat crawls slowly down her skin, slithers into the dark hollows created by the light. She peers at me, blinking slowly, her breath slowing as she turns to face me. "_My_ thoughts?"  
"Yes, Mary Jane," I say patiently. "What do you think of, when you think of revenge?"

She clears her throat; one delicate hand brushes an infinitesimal stand of hair behind her left ear. "I think of..." she trails off. When she speaks again, her voice is low, quiet, deadly. "I guess I think of love, Otto.

"I think of everything I've loved, in my life. I think of my mother and my father. I think of my sister. I think of sunlight and air, and I think of water as green as an emerald. I think of my friends. I think of my husband, and I think of everything I sacrificed just to keep pace with him, just to be close to him.

"When I think of revenge, I think of love. Because if you follow Love for long enough, you wind up with Revenge sooner or later." She emits a short, bitter laugh. "It's amazing how the things you really wanna tear apart, in the end, are the things you used to love beyond everything else."

I nod. So. She _does_ understand, after all.

She looks up, her eyes challenging me to say something in response. "That a good enough answer?"

"It's the only kind of answer I would expect you to give," I reply.

She inclines her head towards the worn leather punching-bag strung from the rafters. "Can I get back to it now?"

"Of course," I say, mounting the stairs. "Keep practising."

I do not look back; I grant her her privacy, as she screams, as I hear the sound of her tentacle's claws tearing into the leather. I leave her alone with her pain, in the hopes that she will either defeat it, or follow its every command.

__

One PM.

The downtown precinct is in uproar.

It has been ever since nine AM, ever since the tape scorched its way across the airwaves. Cops dashing about, papers being dragged out of files and put away again, computer searches being run, task forces being assembled. Maybe if it was the woman, on her own, they wouldn't be like this. If they could be sure she was acting alone, they might slow down, be less frantic, less filled with barely concealed panic.

It's the name 'Doctor Octopus', of course, that has ignited them. His name is a huge, dark boulder, shattering the surface of a relatively still pond. They believe her. They believe she is with him now. They cannot afford not to. If she is his weapon - and there is of course nothing else she could be; normal people, good people, don't change sides like that - then they must monitor her, wait and see if she explodes.

Detective Neil Garrett is not at all surprised by the polite tapping sound emanating from beyond his second-story office's window. Nor is he surprised when his eyes, dark brown and dimmed even further by lack of rest, meet those that are wide, white, and rimmed with black.

Sighing, Garrett pulls up the sash, and allows Spider-Man in. "Doc Ock, right?"

"Spider-Man, actually, but the resemblance between us is uncanny."

"Funny." Garrett closes the window. "You always this hilarious, or only when people's lives might be in jeopardy?"

"Well, that's when I bring out my 'A' material," Spidey says, perching on the edge of the desk and gazing down at the disorganised mess of papers that adorn it. "Little light reading?"

"Octavius' various files and records." Garrett moves across, slumps back behind the desk with a resigned exhalation. "I don't know why I'm bothering. The man's got a criminal record as long as my arm - hell, as long of one of his arms. So far the only part of his MO that this thing with the girl fits into is a coupla incidents years back, when he took on two female protegees."

Spidey nods. "Trainer..."

"...And Brancale. Yeah." Garrett shakes his head. "Although how that ugly sonovabitch manages to work such an impressive amount of mojo over women is beyond me. Especially since they never seem to come to good ends."

Spidey looks up sharply. "Meaning what?"  
"Meaning that both Ock's little playmates aren't in the best of spirits right now. Brancale's dead. Was kept on life-support for a few years, but when you're that obese, it's only a matter of time..." He shrugs, sifts through papers. "And Trainer's locked up in Ravencroft Asylum. You won't get much out of her. She thinks the FBI are spying on her through her TV set."  
"Are they?"

Garrett smiles cynically. "Anything's possible. My point is, we've gotta get this girl back before she dives right off the same cliff-top as these ladies. Most of us figure she's been brainwashed, a whole Patty Hearst kind of deal. A pawn for Ock to shift around the chessboard. She hasn't done anything, yet, that we know of, but in the meantime, we gotta treat this statement of hers as serious as a bomb threat."

"She won't hurt anyone," Spidey says. He doesn't know if he ought to add a question mark to the end of that sentence.

"Can't be sure of that. Whatever voodoo Otto works over people, he knows how to work pretty well. If he asks her to steal for him, she might do that. If he asks her to kill for him, well, she might do that too. We don't know. Anything Ock's concerned with, we have to be more _concerned with._

"Luckily, people have been coming forward since this morning. Not many, but some. We got a call from one chick, a model pal of Watson's, not too coherent but we got the gist of it. Apparently Ock's done something to the girl, something physical. A tentacle outta her back." Garrett winces. "Poor kid. And, yeah, we got that corroborated by one Gerald Cordover, a fashion photographer who says he saw her a couple weeks ago. And from what he says, I wouldn't wanna be any of the bigwigs in the fashion world right now."

The white eyes seem to narrow. "Other than in a general sense, how do you mean?"

"Apparently she showed up at one of Alessandra Georgiano's warehouse parties. Uninvited, I'm sure I don't need to tell you. Cordover says they were all a little drunk, and when they saw her, they got, quote, 'a bit hysterical', unquote. What I think it means is that they saw the..." Garrett waves a hand irritably "…The whatever-it-is Ock's attached to her, and freaked. And from what Watson says on that tape, and with the encouragement of her ever-so-close buddy and mentor, Otto – I got an inkling she's gonna freak 'em right back."

Garrett crosses his legs, loosens his tie. "Georgiano's having another fashion show. Tonight. I've convinced the Chief to let me have a few cops guard the place, but he isn't taking it all that seriously." Garrett looks vaguely shifty. "So if you were just in a certain neighborhood – say, the Upper West Side – at a certain time – say, nine PM – then maybe you might feel a sudden inclination to, I dunno…"

"Swing by?" Spidey supplies dryly.

Garrett gives a shrug of exaggerated unconcern. Then, as if a memory has suddenly been triggered, he leans forward, slowly, eyes betraying a glint of sympathy. "Hey. You're a pal of her husband's, aren't you?  
"Eh?" Spidey says, taken by surprise.

"You've got a pretty impressive file, too, Bunky. Says one Peter Parker useta be your exclusive photographer back when he worked at the Bugle_. This Parker also happens to be the proud hubby of Mary Jane Watson. Did you know that?"_

"Yeah." Spidey feels his throat tightening, fights against it. "They made a good couple, I_ always thought."_

Garrett shakes his head, turning back to his papers. "We been trying to reach him all day, but, unsurprisingly, he's persona non grata_ at the moment. Man, I'd hate to be in that poor bastard's shoes..." he mutters. "Know what I mean?"_

When he looks up again, the window is open, and the office is empty.

Two PM.

One thing everyone needs to know about me: I'm an actress. And I'm a damn good one, too.

I think about this as I kick the holy hell out of the punching-bag, feeling the blows shudder through me as explosions of dust rise from the bag's beaten surface. I'm really only supposed to be practising with Brenda, getting more of a feel for her rhythms and motions, but there's still nothing like the feel of violence in your own fingertips, tingling through your limbs. Nothing like the feel of tearing something to bits with your own hands.

Not to say that Brenda hasn't been cooperative. I think I've already mastered her, in a lot less time than I expected to. I only occasionally need to form conscious mental commands, now; to extend her smooth body outwards from me, to feel her power crackling through me like lightning, is the most natural reflex in the world. I'm even finding it hard to remember what it felt like not to be attached to her; I wonder how ordinary people ever get along with only the limbs God gave them. How anyone ever claims their power without a tentacle to help them reach out and grab it.

I've been wondering how it is that I can just drift along with this, allow Otto's current to take me where it will. I'm not insensible to notions of right and wrong. I was raised with morals, with ethics. And I've reached the conclusion that it's all about acting.

They tell you, in Drama class, that acting isn't lying, it's telling the deepest truth. I'm living a version of myself, now. One facet of me has splintered away from all the rest, and it's the only one I'm choosing to focus on. I'm not really a real person any more. And the great thing about that is that I can do whatever I want. Live however I want. Forget whatever I want.

So this is the part I'm inhabiting, now. Mary Jane Watson. Who is she, exactly?

She's got everything, and she's got nothing. She can't be hurt again because she's smack bang in the middle of her own anger, where she can't feel anything. Does she love anything? She's fond of some things. Otto, for example, will never know how much she appreciates him, and everything he's done and continues to do for her. But love? No. That'll never happen again, she doesn't think.

She's reinvented herself, remade herself like a glitzy Hollywood film. She never slows down, because when the adrenaline stops pumping, she knows the nightmares will start. She's a Queen eager to steep herself in blood. She's the star of a movie they'd never dare to make. She's a heart attack that steals up on you in the night. She's not just the sharpened knife on your table, she _is_ the table, and maybe she's you, too. You won't know until it's too late.

And what's her motivation?

She's given her heart to vengeance, not just on those who once caused her pain, but on the world that invented pain, on life itself. She's going to forget she was ever scared, ever vulnerable, ever susceptible. She's defined herself all over again, and she'll be damned if she's going to let anyone else tell her she's done it incorrectly.

Most of all, she's doing this because she's ugly. Oh, yes. She's ugly as sin. And she's going to make sure everybody knows just how ugly she really can be.

__

Three PM.

At any moment now, the kids will be home from school. They'll come bounding in, wet from the rain, little unleashed puppies, and they'll start telling her all about their day, about what they learned in class and what kids they talked to and what the teacher said they'd need for the next class project.

Gayle knows she ought to get up from the couch, ought to turn off the TV and get dinner under way. It's pot roast tonight, and when she got up this morning, she meant to get it cooking early on, so she wouldn't have to hustle for her impatient sons in the afternoon. But the meat is still packaged in the freezer; the stove is still cold; Gayle is still on the couch, still staring at the TV.

Finally, her movements slow and stiff as those of a zombie, she picks up the phone and starts dialing.

"Hi. My name is Gayle Watson, and I'm calling for Philip Watson…? Thank you."

A long pause. She fiddles with the phone cord. Then:

"Hi. Did you see - ? Yeah. Yeah, I know. Yeah." A sigh, and Gayle shuts her eyes, lightly brushing her forehead with trembling fingertips."She's really gone and done it now, Dad."

__

Four PM.

****

There. It's done.

Just a trifle, really. A learning aid for my avid pupil. Perhaps she will not even prove to need it; the advances she has made in controlling her new limb have been astoundingly swift. Still, it never hurts to have as much support as you can, even if you don't really require it.

I lay aside the intricate tools, hold the object up to the light, weigh it in my hand. Light as a feather, almost. I tune it to the frequency of my upper-left-hand tentacle, dim the lights, take off my glasses, and try it on. The feeling is vertiginous at first, but once the unfamiliar sensation is past, it handles extraordinarily well. I wish I had thought of it back when I was starting out; as it is, the germ of the idea only came to me after we returned from our little field trip to the car yard the other night. One thing I've always been good at: creating electronic gadgets to make life as painless as possible. Or at least, some aspects of life.

I take it off, replace my glasses, and examine the item. Even though it is purely a practical consideration, as a whole, I still attempted to impart some kind of aesthetic to its design. Though I have no desire to appeal to Mary Jane's vanity – indeed, vanity is at the heart of all which we now both of us despise – I wanted her to wear it with a certain impressive dash and elan, a certain pride.

I hope she likes it, in other words.

I head downstairs, descending into the living room. Shadows are painted on the unlit walls, cast into gloom by the onset of rain; light flickers across the wallpaper from the television set, switched on, the sound low but within my hearing range.

"…Despite warnings, Georgiano claims that tonight, the show will indeed go on. This collection, Georgiano's first foray into nightwear, has been for the past few months one of the most anticipated events in the fashion world; Georgiano herself states that last month's show 'was just a warm-up act' for this one. Coverage of the show will air on Channel Six tomorrow evening. Back to you, David."

The image transforms, with a blink of static, into a commercial on another channel. I crane my neck to see over the back of the couch, and sure enough, there she is, lying on her side, curled up amid the sofa cushions. Her skin is painted with a thin patina of sweat; her hair, tied back, has nevertheless come loose and hangs in messy strings around her face; her tentacle lies beside her on the seat, claws still open but still, in an attitude of exhaustion. She has been working out all morning, and most of this afternoon. I look down on her, watching the rise and fall of her body as she breathes, and experience a quiet sense of awe in my accomplishment.

I watched her down in the basement, too, for a brief period, unnoticed; she was raining blow upon blow down on that old punching-bag, at first shrieking her hatred out, then becoming more methodical, more cold-blooded in her angles of attack. Sweat rained down upon the dusty cement floor; her breath rasped in her lungs; her eyes became glazed with pain and effort, but still she continued, still she fought on.

I did this. I made this girl. Well, perhaps not made her, not from scratch. But in its way, is that not more impressive? I took the rawest of raw materials, an unformed thing; I tore it down; I refashioned it into something finely crafted, something truly worthy of respect and admiration, of _more_ than respect and admiration. She thought she was happy in her old life, until I gave her a new one.

When I look at her, I know how it must feel to be God.

I assume she is asleep now, and begin to move away, my tentacles carrying me without the hint of a sound; it is her own voice, rising from the depths of the couch, which makes me stop. "Did you see that?"

I incline my head in her direction. "See what, Mary Jane?"

"That news story. Just now." Her voice is drowsy, weighed down with the day's exertions. "About Alessandra Georgiano."

"Yes. I saw it. The closing part of it, anyway."  
"One of the most anticipated events in the fashion world, they said."

I pause. "Yes."

"The show I was in was only a warm-up act, she said."

I begin to understand. "She did, yes." A silence. "Mary Jane, was she one of those who - ?"

"We've got to go to it." Her voice, hard and cold as an ice wall. "Tonight. The show."

I don't argue. One cannot argue with vengeance. "Do you know what time it begins?"

"Nine."

Remembering all of a sudden, I slip my hand into my pocket, produce the object. "Perhaps you might like to take something along."

"Like what?"

"A…gift."

She sits up, leans over the back of the couch, blinking at me. The light of the television casts a faint blue glow across her pallid features. "A gift?"

"Yes."  
"A gift. From…you to me?"

I am thankful for the dim light, as I feel my face begin to burn. "A practical gift. Something you may be able to use."

It would be easier to hand it to her using a tentacle, but something compels me to press it into her hand myself.

She opens her fingers, and gazes down upon it. I watch her face in expectation.

The surface of the eye patch, made from the same shiny black plastic as my glasses, glints in the low light.

"It's great." Her tone is irascible. "All I need now is my peg leg and my parrot."

I look away, determined not to let her see my disappointment. "Put it on."

She looks up, puzzled. "Hey, don't get me wrong, Otto. I think eye-patches look as cool as the next person who grew up reading _Treasure Island_, but isn't it a little impractical?"  
"Put it on," I insist.

Shrugging, she stands up, winds the band over her head and under her hair, arranging the patch over her left eye.

"Do you see the small red dot in the right-hand corner?" I ask.

She squints. "Uh, yeah."

"Tap it."

She does, tapping briskly upon the patch with one fingernail. The other eye widens, and she takes a short, staggering step back.

I nod, smiling. "Yes. Not quite as unimpressive as it seems, is it?"

"I…" She swallows. "What _is_ it?"

"Think of it as akin to training wheels," I say, moving behind her to adjust the patch slightly, so it sits better over her eye-socket. "Something I began to throw together this morning. I had at one stage planned to use it myself – " A harmless lie; I do not wish her to believe that I went to any particular effort to please her " – But I think you may need it more than I do.

"It's a kind of viewscreen. As you can no doubt gather, it will enable you to see through your tentacle's eyes, so to speak. No one will be able to sneak up behind you. Nothing will take you by surprise. You will have, as they say, 'eyes in the back of your head'."

She slashes her tentacle through the air experimentally. "This is just…Wow." She shakes her head, her lips slightly parted in an expression of wonder I find intensely gratifying.

"Indeed. And to switch it off –" I gently reach out and tape the left-hand corner of the patch " – You do this. The plastic is tinted but clear, so your vision ought to be unobstructed."

"I feel a little dizzy now," she says, giving a throaty laugh as she sits back down on the couch.

"You'll get used to it. Before tonight, with any luck."

She takes it off, and gazes down upon it, slowly and idly winding the band around her tapering fingers. She offers up to me a grateful smile. "It's a wonderful gift, Otto. Really wonderful. Thank you."

I shrug, affecting a nonchalance I am irritated with myself for not, in fact, feeling.

__

Five PM.

Nothing but black and purple, as far as the eye can see. From the black curtains that stream and billow in the wind, and the Japanese-style black lacquered table in the centre of the room, to the purple draperies that seem to melt like stalactites from the ceiling and the purple velvet chaise longues – Alessandra Georgiano's whole suite, fancy and expensive as it is, basically just looks like one big bruise.

Spidey considers it conclusive proof that all the money in the world can't purchase good taste.

Prising open the skylight, he silently leaps down into the suite, fast as the falling rain outside, landing smoothly in a crouch, his spine arched with tension.

"Put the gun away, Ms. Georgiano," he says quietly. "I'm not here to hurt you."

A whisper of velvet curtain, and Alessandra, dressed in a black silk kimono, her hair in a thick ebony braid, an old-fashioned pistol in one manicured hand, steps forward, her faded blue eyes flashing with wariness and anger.

"You do not think I will shoot you?" she snaps, her voice too high, taut as wire.

Spidey slowly straightens up, hands in the air, and turns around to face her. "Depends. What's the answer I could give that would result in your putting away the pistol?"

Alessandra barks a laugh. "You know, most people think of me, she is a fashion designer, she is a lightweight. She does not know how to defend herself. But this pistol, it was my father's. A military man. A general, he was. He taught me to shoot. And if I need to defend myself…" She pulls back the hammer on the gun with an audible 'click' "…I will use the things I have been taught."

"I'm not here to hurt you," Spidey repeats. "Exactly the opposite, in fact. I've come here to make sure you don't get hurt. Or end up having to use anything you've been taught, apart from maybe 'duck and cover'."

Alessandra's eyes narrow. "I do not understand you."

"Call off the show tonight, Alessandra. I don't know if you've been watching the news, but – "

Another laugh, just as lacking in warmth or humor as the first. "I am watching the news, yes. I saw the tape, the Mary Jane tape. I threw a wine bottle through the television set."

"You know, most people just register their complaints with the network, but I guess that works, too," Spidey tries, but it's no good. The look of hate in those eyes will not bend, will not fade. Briefly, he wonders if these are the same eyes, with the same look, that bore down upon MJ only weeks ago.

"The police, they call me. They tell me to call off the show, too. And you know what, I tell them the same thing I am telling you, and the same thing I will be telling her if she comes near to me: go to hell. I will not be intimidated. Not by freaks."

The ugly word cuts through Spidey, strikes at a part of him worn already raw by guilt and grief. In that moment, he hates Alessandra, hates the word that falls from her tongue as he hates those that fell from his in that fatal moment, that moment when he lost Mary Jane.

"Ms. Georgiano," he says, his voice thick, seething with a disgust only barely contained, "Call off the show. Postpone it. A lot of people are gonna be there, a lot of people whose blood is gonna be on your hands if you do nothing to prevent this."

"Mary Jane will not dare to show her face this evening," Alessandra responds, a tremor in her voice that only someone paying as close attention as Spidey is at this moment could pick up on. "She will not dare, and nor will…" She falters. "Nor will – he._ Doctor Octopus. The police will be guarding the area. I have my own security. And besides…" She laughs a third time, this time with a suggestion of hysteria. "…Besides, the girl is a model. Dumb. Dumb as cattle. She was pretty, now she is a freak – but what has changed with her mind? Nothing. She is stupid, too stupid to hurt me."_

"The phrase 'takes one to know one' springs irresistibly to mind," Spidey says, his voice a sliver of ice.

Alessandra snarls, thin, painted lips curling over bright, sharp teeth. "Laugh, freak. I do not care. The show will go on tonight, just as I have it planned. And if you will kindly take your leave, Spider, I wish to get myself ready for the evening ahead."  
Spidey is silent. There is no more to say. Truth to tell, there isn't any more he wants to say to this hideous woman. He's warned her; she won't listen; and tonight, he'll probably have to save her worthless ass from whatever it is MJ is going to pull. In some dark recess of his mind, actually, he kind of likes the idea of just sitting back and letting MJ do whatever she likes to Georgiano; just keep his distance, and let his wife unleash all the hounds of hell on this vain, arrogant creature…

Aw, MJ. I think I'm starting to understand you now.

He raises his arm, sends out a swift, liquid dart of web fluid, and is gone the same way he came in. Georgiano watches him leave, her eyes still little more than slashes of blue poison.

It is some time before she has the courage to put down the gun.

__

Six PM.

And the curtain descends.

A cloak of purple, studded with diamonds, falls over the city, and the heat and smog seem to rise from the cooling pavement as a silence falls over the world. Their world. Not my world.

I stand on the roof, my hair and my coat streaming in the wind. The chill seeps through the thin red T-shirt, through the jeans, even through the thick black workman's boots on my feet; I can't say I mind all that much, as its bite gives me an edge, makes me just that little bit more aggressive. The fedora Otto gave me to wear tonight, too big for me, dips low over one eye; I push it back, wrap the coat tighter around myself.

I'm looking out over the tin rooftops of Ock's neighborhood (our neighborhood), and beyond, across the city skyline, the noises of urban pollution seeping, ever so faintly, into my ears, even from this distance. The suburbs die with the onset of night, but the city is re-animated, finds new life streaming through its electric veins, hissing through its telephone wires, growling through its concrete jungle undergrowth.

I know just how it feels.

My body shivers, does a tiny little undulation independent of my will. It's time to go on, MJ. Time to start up the show, give 'em a little magic, give 'em some flash and glitter. Ock's the steak, but I'm the sizzle. I'll burn it all up tonight. Every doubt and every fear, every last trace of the bonds that they used to hold me back, I'll burn it all on a funeral pyre, light up the sky with my old life's death.

I look up, and am greeted with a peal of thunder from the lowering clouds. Too bad. No moon tonight. Nothing to howl at.

Behind me, a squeal of hinges; just for fun, I switch on the tiny viewscreen hidden away in my eyepatch, my shiny new toy. One eye, my own eye, can still see out beyond the rooftops; the other watches, in dipping, looping BrendaVision, as Otto half-emerges from the attic trapdoor. He's looking as good as I feel, swathed in black leather that catches the light and tosses it back into the darkness; his tentacles writhe with deliberate slowness, a motion I'm coming to recognise as signifying excitement on his part, even when his face displays no sign of emotion.

"What are you doing up here?" he demands bluntly.

I smile, even though I know he can't see it. "Getting into character."

A quizzical look flits across his face; he shrugs it away. "Well. Anyway. It's time." A pause, and then:

"Do you really feel you're ready for this?"

I whirl Brenda through the air, finishing with a flourish and a metallic snap of her claws. "Positive."

Otto gives an acquiescent nod, then motions for me to climb onto his back. Switching off the BrendaVision, I turn on my heel, and, without hesitation, clamber aboard. Something so reassuring about his solidity, the weight of him; the immovable object, that which will never change, never vanish suddenly when you still need it.

But not so immovable, after all, as he leaps through the space between the buildings with a grace and speed belying his form; the cold wind digs frost-bitten claws into every exposed inch of skin, brings my eyes to tears, but I don't mind, and I don't shut my eyes. I hug myself closer to Otto, pressing my ear to his back, listening to the faint thump of his heartbeat beneath that thick leather hide.

The quietude and dim street-lights of suburbia fade at our backs, and the noise and life of the city speeds closer, ever closer, until we're in the thick of it again, skimming up the skyscrapers, deafened by the traffic and the talk and the million and one noises that make up a metropolis. I blink the neon from my eyes, gazing down in delight, not affected by vertigo in the slightest. I don't even think of what it used to be like, with Spider-Man, in the old days. Because the old days are gone. And I don't want to live anywhere but here.

As I peer a little closer through the circus of light below, I realise we've gone uptown. Way uptown. The buildings we scale are expensive hotels, Hiltons and Hyatts and Ritzes, oh my; restaurants with tasteful white-and-gold interiors for the old rich, nightclubs with glitter-spangled doorways and velvet ropes for the young rich. A sudden fantasy appears in my head of Otto and I bursting into these fine establishments and tearing the places in two, dividing the spoils between us like Viking conquerors. I giggle quietly at these delicious thoughts; I think Otto hears, but doesn't comment if he does.

When we finally alight, in a fairly nondescript area - the deserted parking lot of one of the restaurants - he asks me a question I at first consider fairly random, until I get what he's driving (so to speak) at: "If you could have any car in the world, what kind would you want?"

I think about it a moment, chewing my lip. "Well, I always liked these, to be honest," I say slowly, running my finger along the hood of a baby-blue 1955 Cadillac. "I'm a sucker for old-school flashiness, I guess. But the one car I always wanted to ride in, that I never got a chance to? A limo. A big, grand, stupid, ostentatious, look-at-me-I'm-richer-than-you limousine." I grin. "'Course, I thought I'd be a movie star, too, and that I'd ride in that limo to big Hollywood premieres, but you know, things don't always work out that way…"

"Some things do," Otto says with quiet satisfaction; and as I follow his gaze, I see just what he means.

It's sitting there, silent and unattended, right in front of us, parked in the lot like it was any other ordinary car in the whole world. A long, black, shining, big, grand, stupid, ostentatious look-at-me-I'm-richer-than-you limousine. The driver must be off somewhere, having a cigarette or something, while the passenger dines on nectar and ambrosia inside.

Their loss.

I circle the beautiful car, glancing through the darkened windows, watching my own reflection as its lip curls in wicked glee. "Oh, now, _this_ is what I'm _talking_ about, Otto." I run my hands over the buffed, polished surface; it's cool under my fingertips, a whisper of warmth still emanating from the only recently-ceased motor. I sigh in satisfaction. "Yeah."

"I think it's a custom job," Otto says vaguely, examining the car.

"I think it's ours, is what it is." I step back, allowing Brenda's nimble claws to work the lock. It gives with a merry little 'click', and as a great man once sang, the lady is mine.

I eagerly make for the back seat, then stop as an annoyingly practical thought pops into my brain. I lean on the roof of the car, giving Otto the once-over. "You sure you can fit in here?" I ask, frowning. "The tentacles, I mean…"

"I chose this particular car specifically because it is spacious enough to accommodate my needs," Otto responds, a mite touchily, I think. "I did not select it purely to appease your sense of frivolity, Mary Jane."

"Well. As long as you can fit, then," I mumble, feeling slightly abashed.

It's a feeling that doesn't last long, though, as I slip into the silken interior of the car. At the end of a veritable corridor of red silk, a resplendent black leather seat lies in wait, like a royal throne. A silver bucket, glistening with moisture, is planted next to the seat, an emerald-green champagne bottle nestling in a bed of ice within. I lick my lips, gazing at it. I haven't had a serious drink for years, not since I was a teenager. But the rules I set for myself then don't apply now, do they…?

I reach out for the bottle, then freeze, hand only inches away from the slender green-and-gold neck. I remember Otto's look of cold disapproval this morning, when I mentioned drinking, and what he said about not celebrating just yet.

I sit back on the seat, bouncing a little with barely-contained excitement. I fold my arms over my chest and look out the window, to avoid temptation.

Otto's left tentacle fiddles in the car's wiring, tiny blue sparks shooting up from the panelling, until his efforts are rewarded with a rich, vital purr of machinery. Seconds later, we've backed out of the lot, and are shooting through the night like stars.

__

Eight PM.

Damned if it isn't way too quiet in here.

I fidget in the back seat, Brenda flipping around impatiently. We've been driving for an hour, and I wonder if we're ever going to get there. I don't remember the city ever being this big, this crowded with traffic, with sluggish pedestrians clogging up the walkways. I'm tempted to just tell Otto to floor it and screw the jaywalkers if they can't get out of the way fast enough, but we've got to stay inconspicuous for the moment. It wouldn't do to be pulled over by a traffic cop, not now, not this close.

Bored and restless, energy surging through me like an electric current, I get up and cross the car, heading towards the back of Otto's seat. He hasn't spoken in ages, lost in whatever inscrutable thoughts habitually glide across his mind. It makes me feel lonely, useless, unwanted. I need to reach out to him, make contact.

I slam, bodily, up against the back of his seat, and lean over, grinning. "Hey. Missed you back there," I say cheerfully.

He gives me a grunt by way of reply. I forge on regardless, allowing Brenda to snake towards the radio; if I'm not gonna get any conversation out of him, I at least want to hear the sound of a voice other than my own.

"They've got champagne in here," I blither, "In a big silver bucket full of ice. I thought about having some now, y'know - give the evening a little more of a kick," I give a giggle that, even to me, sounds slightly unbalanced. "But then I figured, this is gonna be enough of a kick by itself, right? Not exactly the best strategy to go in there tanked up. Besides, there'll be time enough to celebrate after it's done."

Brenda flips the dials.Nothing but talkback garbage and vapid pop. I make a face. "_Never_ anything good on the radio these days..." Otto doesn't see fit to respond to that, so I give up, and head back to my seat.

I slump backward, giving my head an irritated toss, leaning it against my arm as I watch the lights stream by, one long liquid illumination. I wonder if these lights are still going to be here when we come back this way, after it's all over, or if I'll blow them out, if the city will explode, shatter like overheated glass. There's so much in me, so much heat and light, it doesn't seem possible that I could leave anything standing in my wake.

Glancing back, I catch a glimpse of Otto, gazing back at me in the rear-view mirror, and smiling, in that closed-lipped, secretive way that he has of smiling. I tilt my head to one side. "Something amusing?"

He snaps his head back down towards the windshield, staring fixedly ahead. "No."

I lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees. "Hey, Otto," I call. "I've been thinking. If I, uh. If I…If the police, you know, _catch _me tonight –"

"Then I will forget I ever met you, and chalk this experiment up as a failure," he says, coldly, quietly vicious.

I blink, unexpectedly wounded. A low blow, coming out of the dark. I hadn't realised he still thought of me as an experiment. And it didn't occur to me that he could forget me just like that. "What I was going to say," I continue, consciously controlling my voice, reining back any trace of emotion, "Was that, if I get caught, I won't blame you for anything."

"You certainly won't." A brief silence. "Thank you, though." More silence. "But it's irrelevant, anyway. You won't get caught."

I look down, swish the melting ice in the bucket around with one finger. "Why exactly did we need this car, anyway?" I ask, changing the subject. "Carrying me around not the thrill it used to be?"

A snort, of either laughter or disgust, it's always hard to tell with him. "I forget how new to this life you really are. The fact of the matter is that, due to your exceptionally convincing performance on that tape, the police will more than likely be expecting us to put in an appearance tonight. The important thing is that you get past the security and inside the building with a minimum of fuss."

"Says the man who enjoys making entrances by knocking down walls," I say archly.

He shakes his head. "You aren't ready for such things yet. In the early days of one's career, subtlety is best."

"Until I actually get inside, you mean."  
He smiles again. "Yes. Until you get inside." A beat. "We're here."

I sit up straight, arching my neck to see out into the night beyond. I catch a flash of klieg lights strobing through the sky, of a red carpet unfurled, of bursting flashbulbs and babbling reporters, and a golden door held open for the hundreds upon hundreds of beautiful people who swarm inside, dressed in sequins and silks and satins.

It's exactly how I remember it, only not.

Otto swings the car round back of the building; as we leave the dazzling lights of the show's façade, it is now possible to see the black-and-white of police cars, the blue uniforms loitering around the perimeter of the show, the imposing men in black suits speaking quietly into tiny earpieces. Not very many of them at all, and those who are here look overly relaxed; clearly, my earlier missive wasn't taken entirely to heart. But never mind. They'll learn.

Otto parks the limo in the plush, roped-off area reserved for Persons who like to think of themselves as Very Important, and turns around in his seat to face me. His breathing is harsh, even though you can tell he's trying to control it, and every move he makes bespeaks an inner tension as coiled as a spring.

"You will enter through the stage door – " He point ahead of us; I can see a fall of light spilling from a crack in the darkened building " – And enter into the main hall via the catwalk. Do not remove your coat or hat. Keep your head down and, if you must speak, keep your voice low. I will seal the exits, take care of the police and security and meet you inside in about an hour."

I don't ask what he means by "taking care of the police and security", because I think I already know and I don't want him to tell me. I just nod, not trusting myself to speak now, the adrenaline beginning to override all my systems of control, breaking down every part of me that might ever have harbored doubts.

I pull open the door, and step out into the night.

A light rain is beginning to fall, visible only as bright needles in the golden haze of the headlights. I stand beside the car, gazing ahead, past the light and through the biting droplets, at the stage door. Music, loud enough out here and therefore likely deafening inside, pumps out onto the air: the coolly angry, repetitive metallic slither of Ladytron's "Seventeen". I wonder for a moment if the inclusion of a song like this in a fashion show is intentionally ironic, then remember that most of these people wouldn't know irony if it walked up and kicked them in the ass with a Louis Vuitton sandal, and put the whole question out of my mind. I can't afford to get distracted.

I narrow the whole extent of my vision to the space between myself and the stage door, one foot moving, shuffling over the wet tarmac; then the other, placed neatly in front of the first foot, and I'm walking, the sliver of light approaching faster and faster. My breath is an icy cloud in front of my face, and my arms, my legs, even Brenda, all feel numb. But I'm walking just the same.

I'm in front of the stage door. There's light in front of me and nothing behind me. Otto has melted into the shadows and I'm not going to think about what he's going to do without me, what he's going to do now he knows I can't see him do it. Otto, you can only shield me so much. When you throw back your head to howl at the moon, there's no escaping the fact that your throat is bared.

I suck in my breath and slam the stage door open.

A musty, graying-white flight of concrete stairs, leading upwards in a vague spiral; next to the door I've just swung open, a burly security guard in an ill-fitting uniform I'm sure they don't pay him enough to wear. He hastily drops the girlie magazine he was perusing with such fervor a moment ago, and steps in front of me. "Ma'am – 'scuse me – Ma'am, I gotta see some ID –" he stutters.

I look up, give him a quizzical look. I could knock this guy out with one swing of my tentacle, but best to play it cool for now. "Alessandra sent for me. I'm supposed to go on tonight."

He shakes his head. "I gotta see ID, Ma'am. There's been some threats earlier today, and the police think maybe…"

I smile indulgently. "Oh, come on. Do I look to _you_ like I could hurt anyone?" I ask, my voice sugar-sweet.

The guard tilts his head to one side, gives me an appraising look. I'm small, thin, delicate. His bulk dwarfs me by a good foot or so of muscle. No, our great masculine protector decides, this little cupcake couldn't hurt a fly. You can practically hear the thoughts as they grind their way through his skull. I wait patiently for them to process.

"Okay, g'wan in," he finally acquiesces, stepping aside with a goofy little smile. God bless stupid security guards.

I trip lightly up the steps, and enter the backstage area, with a loud _clang_, through a whitewashed tin door.

The familiar pandemonium. They're all here. Models rushing about, clad in filmy nightdresses that waft in the slightest breath; harried stage-managers with clipboards organising the lighting and the music and the girls; make-up artists and wardrobe managers and hairdressers, the smell of perfume and sweat and new clothes. All that's really changed is me.

I glance up at the clock. Five past nine. The show's already started. No wonder the security guys weren't watching the back door; the lure of a bunch of leggy women parading around in negligees was too much to resist.

One of the stage-managers rushes up to me, not even glancing at my face. "Why the hell aren't you in a nightgown?!" she shrieks.

I look up at her indolently, from beneath the shadow of my hat. "Because I'm not tired," I drawl.

"Very funny," she sneers, still scanning her clipboard. "Get your ass into something skimpy and go ask someone to make room for you on the runway lineup."

"I think I've had it with _asking_ people to make room for me," I say, and push her aside, as if she weighed less than tissue paper. She stares at me, open-mouthed; I fling her a glance back over my shoulder, and smile. The light of recognition clicks on behind those vacant eyes; her mouth forms a soundless 'O' shape, and she races off, stumbling slightly in her terror.

I sigh. Ah, well. Looks like rehearsal will have to be cut short after all. Never mind. I've always had a talent for improvisation.

The relentless pounding of the music sends ripples of sound through my skull, adding an extra beat to my heart. I peek out through the curtain, onto the catwalk; one of the models, Anoushka, I think, is turning on her heel at the end of the runway and stalking back towards me, borne on waves of flashbulb light, clad in a nightdress composed of black ostrich feathers that looks like it'd be absolute hell to even breathe in, let alone sleep in.

I don't think any more. My mind shuts off as the chemicals bubbling in my brain overload, and I just let my body do all the work as I throw aside the curtain and stride out onto the catwalk.

The light explodes around me, like detonating land mines, and I feel it curling into my bloodstream, heating up my skin. Beyond the light and the music I hear a murmur of confusion. _She's not wearing a nightgown! Surely this isn't the dish we ordered?_

I wait until Anoushka passes me, her spicy perfume wafting into my nostrils, infecting my mind. Every sense is magnified, blown up to a thousand times its normal proportion, objects in the mirror are closer than they appear…

With a wild striptease flourish, I whip the hat and trench coat off and hurl them aside, grinning like a jackal. Brenda unfurls joyously, her long black body winding through the air like an electric eel through a pitch-dark sea, whipping and cracking, sharp, sharp claws unsheathed and ready.

It's an interesting thing, to hear a whole room full of people gasp. It's like a vaccuum, as if all the air suddenly rushes straight out of the room, before you even have time to blink. The music cuts off; Anoushka, just about to disappear behind the curtain, freezes, her pretty eyes the size of dinner plates. It's so quiet, quiet as a cathedral, and it is a cathedral, it's the First Church of Mary Jane Watson, and this is my pulpit, this is my altar, and all of you out there staring up at me in the dark, you're all my sacrifices.

My grin grows wider as I slowly, deliberately walk forward, a swagger in my step, Caesar gazing down at the gladiators about to die for him. "Hello, _darlings!"_ I cry out jubilantly, flinging my arms wide as if to embrace them all, and my voice echoes around the room, rings from the rafters.

"_My_, but it's good to be back. I can't tell you how much I missed all this. Oh, and you'll have to excuse my inappropriate attire; while I'm perfectly aware that a _real _woman would be only too happy to prance down a cold runway at nine o'clock in the evening, freezing her tits off in something _faaa_-bulously impractical, I decided to go with a different look. A _very_ different look." I twirl, on the edge of the catwalk; Brenda slithers out across the audience, snapping her claws only inches away from a petrified-looking fashionista, who clings to her younger companion in horror.

"Do you like it?" I ask coyly. "Personally, I think it's going to be the next big thing. Write that down, you gorgeous magazine people! Take a tip from someone in the know. Tentacles – they're the new black.

"Oh, hey, I know what you're all thinking," I say cheerily, walking back up the runway, my visible eye still scanning, searching, cutting through them like a laser beam. "You're thinking, _Monster!_ You're thinking, _Freak!_ You're thinking, _How do I sneak out of this godforsaken hall without her noticing me_, which, by the way, you can't. Sorry, kiddies," I call to the poor suckers at the back of the hall, frantically trying to open the doors without calling attention to themselves. "The doors, unless I miss my guess, are all sealed shut by now." I shake my head in mock mournfulness. "Oh, no. I don't see any of you getting out of here in the near future. Not until I'm ready to let you go. Not until you're ready to behave…

"See, that's my problem. I never really felt ready to behave. Never really wanted to keep my mouth shut and look pretty and smile. But I did it anyway. Know why? Because people like you when you do that. Men like you, women like you. Agents like you, fashion designers like you. You're their own little bendy-toy, to shift into as many positions as they like, to play dress-up with until it's time to put their toys back in the cupboard and go home."

(Man, I can see why Otto likes making speeches so much. This is _tremendous_ fun.)

"But when their toy gets broken, when it gets damaged – then they don't like it so much. Oh, they just don't like it at all. It's _ruined_, they cry! _Worthless!_ And they throw it in the garbage can, move on to the next little plastic doll.

"Ladies and gentlemen – I don't like to behave. That much I've already told you. But you know what I hate even more?" I can feel my eyes blaze, and they feel it too, as the heat scorches across them, sears into their flesh. "I. Hate. Being. _Thrown_._ Away_."

And Brenda soars into the air, smashes into the spotlights overhead with unbelievable speed and strength, and as the shards of glass rain down, as the bulb explodes, so does the audience. They're screaming, a pack of howling, grasping, clawing animals, rushing as one to the exits and pulling desperately at the doors, scratching with manicured nails, punching with moisturized fists.

I swing Brenda to the other side, bringing her down on the overloaded buffet table, expensive food turned into garbage with the flick of a muscle. The klieg lights are next, Brenda crashing through the crystallised glass, erupting in a fountain of broken diamonds. Swinging my gaze around to the audience, I select a shrieking woman at random, encircle her waist with Brenda's wiry body, and yank her up on to the stage. She stares at me, unable to speak, struck mute by sheer horror.

I pluck her earrings from her lobes, tearing through the skin, causing her to snap out of her torpor and scream even louder, clapping a hand to her injured flesh. I take the moment to snatch her necklace, too, and affix it around my own neck. "The spoils of war, sweetie," I shrug, and toss her back out into the crowd, where she lands, momentarily dazed, in a heap, then scrambles to her feet and joins the screeching mob once more.

I stand there on the catwalk, laughing softly to myself at the sight of all these rich, secure, glamorous, beautiful people reduced to a pack of baying hounds. Their faces, so perfectly made-up, painstakingly composed as works of art, are pale and drawn, ugly in the grip of fear. They feel so small, so small. Perhaps even as small as they once made me feel. Power shifts so easily, it's a wonder more people don't seize hold of it.

The sense of invincibility surges through me, a transfusion in the blood; wildness, madness, call it what you like, sinks its teeth into my heart, and I decide that what's needed here is a musical celebration. Brenda obediently delves down into the sound setup beside the stage, resurfacing every other second with a fistful of CDs.

"Crap. Crap. Trash. Awful. Terrible. Crap." I toss the CDs aside one by one, until, at last, I find something perfect, something that really speaks to me. I hand it back to Brenda, who slides it into the player, clicks past the preceding tracks, presses PLAY.

A blare of drums and organ and guitar, resolving into a roaring blast of feverish soul. A song that begs and cajoles, screams and shouts and threatens. Gloria Jones' original and best version of "Tainted Love". A favorite of Mom's, oh, Mom, look at me now, would you recognise me, be proud of me? Am I still your daughter? Am I anyone's daughter now?  
I leap up, carried off by the music, and whirl down the catwalk, delirium in my head, the furies in my heart, dancing over the broken glass, Brenda partnering me in wild abandon, flicking out every so often to tear at sizzling wires here, to smack a hole through the plaster walls there. A dance of destruction, a dance of death. Bring the house down. I spin out of control, laughing, bellowing the lyrics at the top of my lungs: "TAKE – MY – TEARS – AND – THAT'S – NOT – NEARLY – ALL – "

And the only thing that stops me, that makes me catch my breath, is that loud 'click' that I hear only inches away, behind my back. Without turning, I activate the patch's BrendaVision; sure enough, as I suspected, there she stands, Alessandra Georgiano in the rouged and powdered and massaged flesh; she stands, short legs splayed in a ridiculously dramatic fashion, blue eyes wide and wet, clutching a pistol in both shaking hands.

"Hey, Alessandra," I say, as lazily as I can as the breath returns to my body. "I'd think about putting that down if I were you. Might hurt yourself."

"Concern for the intellectually impaired. That's what I like to see in a budding supervillain."

That voice.

__

That voice.

I whip around, stare up, into the shadows that dance across the ceiling. Curled around one of the broken and useless lighting fixtures is a small, slight figure, the blue and red of his costume crosshatched with black fishnet, his eyes gleaming ovals of white.

"Well, well, _well_," I breathe.

Alessandra looks up, her teeth bared in a grimace of rage. "I thought I told you to stay out of this!" she hisses.

"No can do, Princess." Spider-Man slithers down, dropping between us, as if he could ever hope to break this up all by himself, as if he has any idea… "Mary Jane," he says, not unkindly, and therefore probably not sincerely, "Unlike this overdressed waste of flesh, _you're_ not stupid. You know this is a bad idea. You know this is wrong. Call it off now, and maybe they'll all go easy on you."

I draw back, my lips parting, teeth champing together in a convulsion of anger. "Go _easy_ on me?" I query, my voice dangerously soft.

"Right." He approaches tentatively, not appearing to notice my tone, one hand held out, in some sort of idiotic gesture of reconciliation. "Everyone knows this is all Ock's doing. I know he's probably told you things, probably made you think he's the only one you have left. But he isn't. He's just using you. He doesn't care about you, the way…the way so many others do."

"So many _others?_ Is that right?" My voice begins to rise and I'm helpless to stop it, not caring if whatever I feel spills over into my words, not caring if the whole damn world hears what I have to say. "You mean like _these_ others?" I sweep my arm out, taking in the panicking population of the room around us. "Like _her? _Like _you?_" I fold my arms around myself, sour laughter bubbling up inside my throat. "Like you said, I'm not stupid. As for Otto, I'd be truly shocked if you had even the faintest idea of what he thinks or feels. You never made any effort to understand him, just like you never made any effort to understand _me_."

And on that final declaration, Brenda sweeps across in as wide an arc as the swing of a pendulum, smacking him off the catwalk, the force of the blow smashing him into the wall.

He's dazed, in pain, in shock; but only for a minute. Swaying slightly, he's back on his feet in a matter of seconds; I brace myself for an attack, but it doesn't come. He just stands there, looking at me, and the fact that that mask displays absolutely no expression whatsoever suddenly infuriates me. He wooed and won me, wearing that mask, and it never occurred to me until now just how deceptive, how unequal, that fight actually was. He could see all of me, written there in my face; I saw nothing of him, could never gauge him, never had the advantage of being able to read his expression. How did I overlook that before? How is it I never realised…

His voice pierces through the smothering veil of my thoughts. It sounds sad, pleading now, thick with desperation. "Please don't make me fight you."

My teeth grind together, so hard I fear sparks may fly; my eyeballs prickle, fury sizzling my optic nerves, turning my world scarlet and black. "Oh, now, you can do better than that. C'mon, Spidey. Let's hear that trash-talk you're so famous for! Let's see some of those glorious acrobatic moves that bring evil-doers to their knees!" I curl my spine luxuriously; Brenda twists and writhes in the air, her claws snapping viciously. "Honestly. What do I have to do to qualify as supervillain material here?"

Spider-Man circles closer, and I can almost feel it as his mind ticks over, that quick, darting mind, flicking through the possibilities, trying to find a way out, a way that'll lead us all towards a nice, neat, happy ending. "You're no supervillain. You're no villain, period. You come from a different life, a life apart from all the craziness that infects this city. You've forgotten that now, but if you'll just let everyone go and come with me – "

"You'll remind me. Is that it?" I sneer. "Sorry, Spider. If I'm an amnesiac, I'm a pretty damn happy one right now."

"You don't look pretty damn happy," he flings back. "In fact, you look…" He looks me up and down, some of that old arrogance, that old spark, seeping back into his frame. That's more like it, Spideykins. I'm just another villain now, and don't you forget it. "…You look pretty ridiculous, to tell you the truth. I mean, I don't know from fashion these days, but that eye patch? Scares me, and not in the way you probably intended. It takes a lot to make a pretty lady like you look like Rooster Cogburn, but somehow, you've mana – _oof!"_

Brenda whips out, knocking his feet out from under him; but this time, he's ready, snatching hold of her, the two of them arching into the air together, him holding on for grim death, she slashing wildly over, under, smashing him against the hard boards of the catwalk, trying to shake him off. In BrendaVision, my left eye sees him, eyelash-close, as Brenda seesaws madly; I can practically feel the sickening thud of his body hitting the ground, reverberating through me.

He leaps off Brenda on the third trip through the air; he leaps, body arching backwards over my head, lands rolling, faces me in a crouch. "That almost hurt, y'know."

His tone is bland, but I'm sure that's blood I see seeping through the mask. I don't waste any more time in conversation; I lash out, trying to hit him, to hurt him, but he dodges me, dances around me; it's actually like trying to catch a real spider, and this thought annoys me so much that I hit out with renewed vigor, the tentacle shattering the catwalk boards in a fine spray of splintered wood. To my horror, she becomes lodged there, stuck in a crevice or some damn thing, and I pull with all my might, bracing my legs, even tugging with my own hands, as she squirms and founders.

I'm so preoccupied with this that I don't even see the web-fluid coming.

It wraps around my legs, quicker than my next breath, and sends me tumbling to the hard floor, teeth rattling in my skull as I hit the ground. It's around my arms, now, binding them in a soft, liquid, unbreakable grip behind my back. Writhing on my stomach, I scream with impotent and murderous rage, with agony, with despair. Truss me up, take my dignity, strip me of my power again, you bastard, lowlife scum, don't know me, don't know about anything, won't let you win again, won't let you all win again, let me up, son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch, kill you kill you kill you –

And an almighty shattering. Of stone, of brick. The crumbling sound of a wall collapsing in on itself, the sound of my mind, my soul breaking, I think, but it's not, it's not, oh, it's not. It's deliverance. It's victory. I twist on my stomach, looking around, and burst into relieved, hysterical peals of laughter. Spider-Man whips around, his attention forced away from me.

Otto stands, framed against the whirling stars and blackened heavens, in the middle of the rubble where the far wall used to be. Bricks, reduced to nothing but sand and concrete, fall like leaves to the ground far below his tentacles. Strands of black hair hang across his face, whiter even than usual; his nostrils flare like a beast's, and his fists clench and unclench in convulsive fury.

The rabble stream out of the building, racing for safety, covering their heads to protect themselves from falling debris; in two quick strides, Otto covers the length of the hall, and wraps a tentacle around Spider-Man's right leg, hauling him skyward to stare, upside-down, into Otto's face, twisted and distorted by unspeakable anger.

"Keep your hands," he intones, his voice steely and sepulchral, "Off. My. Girl."

Spider-Man gazes back, and when he speaks, his voice is a single, low note of loathing. "You first."

Otto snarls, and draws a second tentacle tight around Spidey's neck, a metallic noose; and it strikes me now that I've seen this enacted a hundred times if I've seen it even once, watched these two spar for as long as I've been embroiled in Spider-Man's life; and only a month ago, if I were here right now, in this place, in this moment, watching as Otto slowly kills the man I thought was the love of my life, I'd be screaming in fear, crying and shaking, maybe even trying to stop it somehow. But now I'm outside it. Now I watch it with the uninvested curiosity of a spectator, a passer-by. I don't even feel angry, or happy, or…anything. I'm kind of tired, actually. I want Otto to hurry it up and get it over with so we can go home and I never have to think about this again, ever…

The ringing report of a gun shrieks through the cold night air.

Otto cries out, clutches his side, as Spider-Man falls to the ground below; the leather under Otto's hand looks darker, slicker. I whip around, to face Alessandra Georgiano, long-forgotten and now making her presence known again, clutching a smoking pistol in her red-clawed hands. She squeaks, realising that all eyes are now on her, and before I can do anything, before I can retaliate, she's on her high-heeled feet, scrambling out through the hole in the wall, and vanishing into the night.

Spider-Man lies there amid the rubble, doesn't move; forgetting about him for the moment, I wrench Brenda loose from the broken board with a monumental effort and a corresponding eruption of woodchips; she slits through the binding webbing with her claws, and, freed, I rush across to Otto. He's collapsed a few feet away, supported by two tentacles, his face blanched. "She get you?" I gasp, the breath rushing away from my lungs; I can't articulate this, can't speak or feel, because oh my God Otto if I lose you, if I lose _you…_

He nods limply. "A…flesh wound, I think," he says hoarsely, wincing as he removes his hand from the wound. It comes away coated in syrupy red. "Not serious. The bullet didn't go in. But we have…to leave."

He glances over my head; I look around, following his gaze to the prone figure of Spider-Man. "We should…take care…of him."

I look at the still, doll-like body, as it rises and falls with a movement barely perceptible. Once, once, once upon a time – I would've cared. I'm sure of it.

I shake my head. "He isn't worth it. We've gotta get you home."

I wind my arm under his, helping him to his feet; in the distance, I hear the sirens beginning to howl their way across town. Otto stumbles a little, leans against me ever so slightly, then, apparently realising this, pulls away. "I'm fine," he insists, but doesn't remove his arm from my shoulders. Then, looking back at Spider-Man: "We really should unmask him, at least."

I shrug one shoulder. "Why bother?" My voice is cold, loud in my ears, still ringing from the gunshot. "He's not important enough."

Somehow we make it outside, into the parking lot, where, by some miracle, our limo is still waiting. This time Otto is the passenger; I'm the one in the driver's seat; and, unlike him, I don't brake at a single red light on the way home.

__

Eleven PM.

The key turns in the lock, the way it always has; the front door opens and slams shut behind him, the way it always has; but she isn't here, and she never will be here.

Stripping off his blood-sodden mask, Peter limps into his living room, privately thanking God that no one saw him coming up the stairs; entering the building by the front door was a risk, and a stupid risk at that, but he's too numb to care now. She's gone. She's with Ock. She's without Peter.

He slumps down onto the couch with a sigh, covering his face with his hands. It aches inside him, gnaws away at the core of his being. He has the dull sensation of being in mourning for someone who has died; but this is worse, isn't it? Gwen died, and now she is preserved in his memory, a dragonfly in amber, forever beautiful – in every sense of the word.

But this is different. This is terribly, terribly different. MJ isn't dead. She's just contaminated, infected with Doc Ock's sickness. Slowly yet surely, the cells of her body are dissolving under the onslaught of the malady; and she's still the same on the outside, in peak physical condition – the bruises on his body testify to her unabated, even enhanced, strength – while, inside, she rots away.

He picks up the remote, clicks on the television, morbid curiosity enveloping him. As expected, it's on every channel. For the second time in one day, MJ's big news.

"Scenes of terror at the Alessandra Georgiano fashion show this evening," the reporter is droning, standing in front of the wrecked building he just left, "As former fashion model Mary Jane Watson and known criminal Otto Octavius attacked the audience in a twisted act of revenge. Watson, whose tape made headlines only this morning, was a former model of Georgiano's…"

Already, they're eulogising her, Peter thinks blearily; recounting her case history, the same way they do to Ock himself. She's going to be one of them._ They're going to mention her in the same breath as Electro, and the Vulture, and Venom. They're going to make her famous._

I guess now would be the time to give up on her,_ Peter thinks, as he drifts off to sleep. _Leave her to the wolves, let her walk the road to hell. Forget her.

__

But he knows, of course, that that will never be possible.

Eleven PM – across town

****

"Lay down. Don't move. Not even a tentacle. Okay?"

For the first time in many years, I find myself obeying someone else's command. In truth, the searing in my side prevents me from doing otherwise; I collapse onto the couch with an exhalation of breath, wincing at the fresh spasm of pain. Mary Jane, dishevelled and bruised but stridently purposeful, glances around, hands on hips. "Where'd you keep the needles and thread?" she demands.

I gesture into the kitchen. "Under the sink," I gasp. "In the, ah – in the second drawer."

She strides into the kitchen without a moment's pause, yanking out the drawer and emptying its contents across the counter, scattering them this way and that, the flood of object overflowing onto the floor. She claws through them, eyes searching, then, with a triumphant grunt, seizes hold of the desired objects. She turns on the stove, heating two long and wicked-looking needles over the sapphire flames. "You sure the bullet didn't go in?" she calls out, suspicious.

I shake my head. "I've been shot too many times not to be able to tell the difference."

She nods, checks the needle, removes it from the flame, switches off the stove, heads back over to me. She kneels down next to the couch, delicately threads the thick, coarse black cotton through the needle's eye. "Turn onto your side," she commands, "And take your coat off. I'd grit my teeth, too, if I were you, because this is seriously gonna hurt like hell."

I freeze. Not through fear of the pain, of course. I am more than accustomed to that particular sensation. But to remove my coat. To let her see me without this barrier. Even with Stunner, with Mary Alice, so difficult at first, so painful. To be soft and pale and defenseless. Exposed.

"I won't take the coat off," I say flatly.

She eyes me with more than a trace of annoyance. "What? I've gotta sew up this wound, Otto. It could be pretty bad. You don't know."

"I don't _want_ to take the coat off," I hiss.

She scans my face, and something in my countenance must give away the source of my reluctance. "Otto. Look. I really don't give a damn what you look like, okay?"

"Do you really think I care about such things?" I snap, acutely aware of exactly how defensive that sounds.

She sighs, touches her fingers to her forehead. "Fine, you don't care. What are you worried about then, huh? That I'll be so - so _overcome_ with crazed _lust_ upon the sight of your naked flesh that I won't be able to _control _myself? If that's it, then, Otto, I think I can absolutely promise you right now that your virtue is safe. Now, please – just take off the freaking coat, or I swear to Almighty _God_ I will do it _myself_."

I hesitate a moment more. And then I do as she tells me.

I undo the coat with unstable fingers, down to the waist, a pale sliver of flesh becoming gradually visible as the buttons come undone. I shrug it off one shoulder, peel it down, exposing my side. The lining of the coat, I see, is painted with gore, and the monotone whiteness of my flesh is interrupted by a flower of dripping crimson.

Mary Jane takes no notice of the body surrounding this wound, makes no comment, and even amid my pain I feel profoundly and absurdly grateful to her for this. She bites off the end of the cotton, presses in closer, biting down on her lower lip, brow furrowed in concentration. Her other hand, the one not bearing the needle, rests lightly, unconsciously, upon my arm.

An explosion of fire, shooting up my nerve endings, as the needle enters my flesh. I clamp my teeth together, grimacing rather than crying out. Mary Jane does not even blink at this gruesome work, drawing the needle in and out of me, pulling the bloodied thread taut across the yawning wound, without a word. I watch her in silence, through tears of pain; her hair is only a breath away from my lips. After a time I feel mesmerised, the pain no longer acute, merely a dull and grinding ache. At the back of my mind, the idea forms that Mary Jane has done this sort of thing before, but in what capacity I can't bring myself to ask, nor to care overmuch.

Finally, she pulls back, absently wiping her bloody fingertips upon her coat. "Okay. That should do for now. I'll go get the Bactine and bandages. In the bathroom, right?"

In a haze, I nod.

She races up the stairs, the tentacle swaying in her wake. I watch her until the strain of turning my neck becomes too much, and I turn back to face the front. Almost independent of my will, one tentacle snakes out, switches on the television.

"Scenes of terror at the Alessandra Georgiano fashion show this evening, as former fashion model Mary Jane Watson and known criminal Otto Octavius attacked the audience in a twisted act of revenge. Watson, whose tape made headlines only this morning, was a former model of Georgiano's…"

I smile. Mary Jane, bottle of Bactine duly clutched in one hand, roll of bandages in the other, pauses on her way back down the stairs, her gaze arrested by the images onscreen. "Hey," she says distractedly, "Turn to the other channels."

I do so, flicking past them rapidly. All of them. Every single one. She's all they can talk about. Her name upon their lips. The fear of her in their eyes. Mary Jane, Mary Jane, Mary Jane.

She sits down, this media goddess, this icon, upon the edge of the couch, staring with a look of rapture at the television screen. Her lips are parted; her own image is reflected in the green glass of her eyes.

I gaze at her, my head propped up on my wrist. Despite the ebb of pain in my side, I feel strangely light, oddly buoyant. Perhaps, it occurs to me in passing, I may be happy. An interesting prospect. I would not have believed it was still possible for me to be happy.

"What are you thinking?" I ask aloud, my thoughts forming themselves into sentences. "My Mary Jane. What, at this moment, is it that you are thinking?"  
She runs her tongue, quickly, across her upper lip. Her tentacle winds around her shoulders, gazing at me, and I know that she sees me, through her patch, through the gift I gave to her. Even so, she does not turn around, looks only at the television. "I'm thinking…" she says, her voice dreamy and detached, almost hypnotised:

"I'm thinking…you've ruined me, Otto."

And she turns around at last. And she looks right at me. And she smiles.


	7. Abandon

**__**

Freak Like Me

By

Santanico

****

Seven: Abandon

Before we were married - before we were dating, even - Peter and I went for a ride on a rollercoaster.

It wasn't just me, of course. Back then, we held each other at a careful arm's length, a respectful distance. He was that cute little brunette fella Gwen was going steady with; I was that giggly redhead his aunt's friend had introduced him to. Not much more. Maybe a little less.

So, along for the ride - Gwen, of course. Gwen, who made being pretty and classy and charming look so effortless that I would laugh louder, make funnier jokes, wear sexier clothes, in an attempt to cover up that strange sense of hopelessness that engulfed me whenever she was near. She was so comfortable with herself, so at home in her own skin, that it made me nervous, and vaguely depressed. She had the nice home, the nice dad, the nice boyfriend. Being around her made me want to get loaded almost immediately.

And Harry. Harry Osborn, the kind of guy you immediately know it's a mistake to get involved with, and just as immediately know that you probably will. Fox-faced, too eager to smile, too quick to laugh, too insecure to believe in. His weakness radiated around him like an aura, made everyone feel sorry for him and embarrassed on his behalf. I don't know why I went out with him. Maybe because I sensed he'd fall apart without me, and maybe because I liked that about him.

The carnival was only in town for that one night; fireflies danced through the dark, warm air, followed us down the street towards Central Park, their flickering, fluttering light eventually eclipsed by the dazzling, dizzying luminescence of the Ferris wheel up ahead. There was a smell of cotton candy and popcorn and sawdust, thick in the air, and it almost hid the stench of pollution for that one glittering night. Harry grasped my hand in his sweaty paw, grasped it a little tighter when Peter was around.

It was Gwen, of course, who suggested we take a ride on the rollercoaster; and it was me, of course, who immediately agreed, shiny little happy MJ, up for any adventure, even though just one look at that behemoth, with its purple cars dipping down wooden slopes and rearing back up, made me want a drink something fierce. Tanked, I could've faced anything, maybe even enjoyed it. But if Gwen thought it would be fun, then so did I. No way was she gonna be the brave one.

Peter looked up, craning his neck skyward, and seemed to visibly blanch. "That's, uh. That's quite a height, there, Gwendy."

"Aw, c'mon, Petey!" I gushed, swatting him with my bag before his girlfriend had a chance to respond. "I like heights. Don't you like heights? Everybody loves heights. Right, Harry?"

"Oh, yeah," Harry agreed readily, running with it. "Heights. You gotta love heights."

"And you, Gwendy?" I asked, magnanimously addressing her at last. "Heights do anything for you?"

"Heights do a lot for me, yes," Gwen replied smoothly, entwining her arm with Peter's, resting her head on his shoulder. "They really just…do it for me. Heights."

Peter turned red; I turned away.

We bought tickets from the carney, climbed in, lowered the smeared metal bar down across our hips. Harry pressed up closer to me, close enough for me to smell the cologne he used to douse himself in – expensive and with a whiff of desperation, just like him. Gwen and Peter were on the other side, pressed together, a world away from us. I watched the crowd, the stars above, the boards below – everything except them.

With a grinding of gears, the carriage started to climb the tracks, inching up, slow as a cold heartbeat. I kept my eyes away from Harry's, even as they mutely pleaded with me to see them, to see him; I ooh'd and ahh'd ostentatiously, looking all around, into space, as we climbed higher, ever higher. And, you know, the strangest thing happened. As we raised ourselves above the city lights, above the treetops, it seemed that everything fell away, dropped to the ground below me. I forgot about Gwen and Peter and Harry; forgot about Mom and Dad; forgot Gayle and her kids, the kids I was meant to babysit that night. As the air became cooler, clearer, so did my mind, my heart. I was lighter than that air. I could almost have floated away on it.

We reached the pinnacle, and we teetered. There was a silence almost audible in and of itself, a kind of collective intake of breath. I was in the moment, completely; the only thing in my life that mattered was what would happen next, where this ride was going to take me, within the next few seconds.

And then the plunge.

A swoop downwards, and a scream tore from my throat, a whooping cry, my hair streaming behind my head and my eyes alternating between squeezing shut, to savor the feeling of it, and opening wide, to take in as much as I could. My whole body was whisked along, curling, dipping, soaring, and the wind sang in my ears. I could feel every drop of blood in my body, taste its metallic tang. Speeding down, down, into the dark, felt right in every conceivable way. If the trip to the top had been exhilarating, it was nothing compared to this endless, bottomless descent.

And even the way down _had_ been a disappointment, or a source of terror, of anguish or pain – it's not as if there was anything I could've done to make it stop.

The bedroom door slams open, startling me awake; a fresh stab of pain in my side welcomes me back to the realm of consciousness. Initially confused by the fact that I am back in my parents' room, rather than on the couch, it takes me a second or two to recall that Mary Jane shifted me here last night to recuperate from my wounds.

Mary Jane, who is striding into the room, her tentacle grasping a miniature stack of newspapers. A cheerful grin is plastered across her face, incongruous against the bruises and scratches, but no less bright for being set against such a grim backdrop.

"Hey!" she greets me, throwing the papers down onto the end of the bed. "Did I wake you?"

I clear my throat, and ask "What time is it?", trying and failing to keep the exhausted moan out of my voice.

"Dunno. Maybe five, five-thirty AM? The sun's risen, anyway. I just thought you'd like to read the notices," she continues blithely, not waiting for a response. "Go over 'em together. You know."

She tosses herself down onto the bed, the jolt of it causing another painful twinge to shoot through my side. "Be careful!" I gasp.

Not listening, she snatches up a paper, pushes herself further up the bed to recline beside me, and starts to read. Over her shoulder, I catch sight of the headline, and read it aloud: "'SUPERMODEL TURNS SUPERVILLAIN'. It's elegantly understated, I'll give them that."

Mary Jane rolls her eyes. "Tch. Honestly. It's not even accurate, you know? I was never even close to being a _super_model."

"I think you'll find that the _Bugle_ tends to value alliteration rather higher than accuracy," I comment, as I scan the article. I can't help but notice that the text is minimal – especially that devoted to the actual victims of last night's escapade – compared to the amount of space taken up by photographs of Mary Jane in action. It must be admitted that she looks striking, even in cheap black-and-white; eyes ablaze, hair swirling like Medusa's locks, tentacle a black, shimmering blur. There are next to no photos of me. No matter. Last night was _her_ night, after all.

"Hey," she says suddenly, thumbing through the article, "It says here that nobody was actually _killed _last night. A whole lot of property damage, some injuries, but no deaths."

I raise an eyebrow. "Do you have a problem with that?"

"No, no. God, no. It's just…when you said you were going to _take care_ of the guards…"

"Knocked out," I say quietly.

She props herself up on one arm, the better to watch my face, her own expression intent, curious. "How come? No offense, but you're not known for being all that compassionate."

I let that slide. "It was your first job. It didn't seem appropriate."

She laughs, skeptically. "Appropriate?"

"You had enough pressure to deal with without the idea of having blood on your hands this early in the game." I pause. Ever since we got home last night, this next question has been preying on my mind. I lay awake most of the evening, turning it over, examining it from all angles, trying to predict what kind of answer she could give. "But, Mary Jane…"

"Mmm?"

"There is one thing. I…" I clear my throat, try to clear my head. "About…Spider-Man, the incident last night with Spider-Man."

She probably doesn't think I notice, but she stills, ever so slightly, at the mention of his name. The light in her eyes seems to fade, to dim. "Yeah? What about him?" she asks briskly, looking back down at the paper.

"What would you have done if I hadn't been there to save you?"

She glances up, an expression I do not know how to read flitting through her eyes – surprise? Worry? Whatever it is, it vanishes; she laughs again, but there is a slight tremor within its light melodiousness. "Well, that's kind of a moot point, isn't it? You were there. I was lucky. We were lucky."

"Yes," I persist, "But if it had been you, alone? And don't believe that that will never happen, Mary Jane," I add, seeing her grimace in annoyance. "Not for a moment. As you saw for yourself – " I gesture in the direction of my stitches " – I am not impervious to injury. So. Again, I ask: if I had not been there, what would you have done?"

She looks back down, trains her eyes on the newsprint, grimly studies it, as though hoping it will reveal an answer. "What are you _really_ asking me here, Otto?" she says softly.

Best just to say it, then. "Would you have killed him?"

Silence descends, soft and blanketing as velvet, upon the room. She does not look up, does not even seem to acknowledge the question that hangs in the air between us. Then:

"That's a little heavy for six in the morning," she murmurs, "Don't you think?"

I gaze at her, at the lowered top of her head. She does not, will not, look up at me. The silence stretches on, deepening, becoming close to unbearable. I decide to let the matter rest.

"It says here," I say, changing the subject with very little subtlety, "That Alessandra Georgiano now plans to take an extended trip to Paris, 'to recover from the emotional trauma of the attack'."

In a flash, my Mary Jane is back, head raised, eyes sparkling with wicked glee. "Oh, yeah, I _bet_," she says, laughing merrily. "Gonna be a while before that particular 'emotional trauma' fades away. You should've seen the look on her face when I first showed up last night - I thought she was gonna have a _heart attack_ or something!" More raucous laughter. "Well, hell, she had it coming."

With a contented sigh, she jumps off the bed, sauntering over to the door, where she pauses, looking around over her shoulder. "I'll make breakfast, okay? You just stay in bed today, work on getting your strength back up. Waffles okay? I suck at cooking just about anything else, so please say yes."

I shrug, in an exaggerated attitude of helplessness. "It would seem I have little choice."

She smiles, turns to leave. As she does so, something occurs to me, and I call out "Mary Jane?"  
She turns back, one eyebrow raised, head tilted, lips apart. The rays of sunlight stealing in through the curtains sink into the blackness of her hair, are absorbed by it; her bangs cast stringy shadows across her bright eyes, her pale skin. It hits me, then, what a delight, what a strange privilege, it is to be able to look at her, to watch her, here in my own home. Rightfully, she belongs to someone else, to that Parker creature. But, against all the odds, she is here. She is here, and she is with me.

Before the pause stretches on too long, into the realm of awkwardness, I remember what I wanted to ask. "How, exactly, did you manage to purchase this morning's papers without detection?"

"Oh, you know," she says casually. "Went down to the local newsstand, bought 'em off a vendor. _Lots_ of people around, of course, but I don't think any of them would've recognised me, do you?"

I sit up, eyes widening in horror, before I realise that she is starting to dissolve into giggles.

"I filched them from the neighbors' front _porch_, Otto. I'm not an idiot." She rolls her eyes theatrically, and closes the door behind her.

I sit there a few moments more, listening to the sound of her feet padding down the stairs. It is only after I am certain that she is out of hearing range that I allow myself a quiet, relieved exhalation of laughter.

__

It's like coming home again.

Peter gazes around the Bugle offices, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket, unnoticed by the bustling throng of journalists and photographers and temps and gofers, the hivelike swarm of activity. He inhales the familiar scents of ink and cheap carpeting and coffee, as he walks the familiar route to Jameson's all-too-familiar office; not too many warm-and-fuzzy recollections to be found there, Peter thinks. "These pictures are all blurry. Well, we'll have to run 'em anyway, I suppose. But I can't pay _you for them." "Stakeout assignment tonight, kiddo. Warehouse district. Oh, around midnight. Whaddaya mean, curfew? You call yourself a newsman?" "Yeah, they're okay, I guess, but can't you get a shot of that Spider-Thing looking more, I dunno…menacing?"_

Ahhh. So many memories.

Cautiously, he beats a tattoo on the door. "Yeah, what?" barks the voice from within. Without allowing himself a moment's hesitation, Peter twists the knob and enters.

Jameson is sitting behind his desk, looking over some proofs, not even displaying the courtesy of turning his eyes upward. Robbie Robertson, however, perched on the edge of Jonah's desk, lights up immediately. "Peter! Hey!"

Jameson glances up; his eyes widen, and he leaps to his feet, a wholly uncharacteristic beam of paternal affection spread across his face. "Well, I'll be goddamned – the prodigal son returns!" Moving swiftly out from behind his desk, he claps an arm around Peter's shoulders. "How you doing, Pete-boy?"

Peter clears his throat uncomfortably. "I think you kind of know the answer to that, Jonah."

"Of course, of course." Jameson nods his head, so very sympathetically. "This, uh, this difficulty with your wife. Women, hahn? What're you gonna do? Hey, Robbie," he calls, "Tell Betty to get a cup of coffee for Parker here, would –"

"Jonah, just save it," Peter snaps. No sleep last night. His eyes are so heavy they _feel weighted down with blocks of iron, and his head is pounding like a pulse-rate. Even Jameson, never the most empathetic of men, notices the dark circles underneath his eyes, the faint traces of bruising around his jaw._

"Save what?"

"I know what you're doing, okay? You can't shine me, I worked for you for too long. And no matter how much you kiss up to me, there's no way in hell I'm granting you an interview, a statement, a photo pictorial, or even a pithy quote for the society column, about my wife. All right? Besides, politeness, courtesy and generosity of spirit really don't become you, JJ."

Jameson bites down on his cigar in irritation. "Oh, how I've missed having you_ around, Parker."_

"What's the problem, Pete?" Robbie asks, recognising the many ways in which this situation could become combustible and seeking immediately to defuse it.

Peter glares balefully at Jameson. "Take a wild guess." He tosses the paper across the desk. Images of MJ, caught between columns of print, frozen in attitudes of rage _and spite and malice, scatter across the polished wooden surface._

Jameson snorts. "Am I supposed to apologise for giving coverage to an important news item, Parker? In case you'd forgotten, that's kinda what we do _here."_

"There's a pretty big difference between 'coverage' and what you've written here, Jonah." Peter snatches the paper up and starts to read, his voice taking on an angry, hysterical pitch that he had practised keeping in check, earlier – apparently to no avail. "'The emergence of Mary Jane Watson as this city's latest supervillain cannot entirely be blamed upon the influence of Otto Octavius; as last night's senseless destruction _made abundantly clear, the mad mannequin herself harbors a vicious and inexplicable grudge against the industry that gave her so much. Can there be any doubt that what we are dealing with is a being every bit as soulless and sociopathic as the man who aided and abetted her in her crime? In the opinion of this editor, justice cannot come swiftly or brutally enough for this modern-day Bonnie and Clyde.'"_

"And here I thought you didn't read my column," Jameson remarks blandly.

Peter glowers. "This is a low, even for you, Jameson. You've met MJ. You liked her. You know damn well she isn't evil, or soulless, or sociopathic! I knew you'd stoop to anything to sell papers, but I at least thought –"

"Thought what, _Parker?" thunders Jameson, losing what little patience he possesses. "That we'd all be willing to go easy on her, to look the other way, because she's married to you, or because she was nice once upon a time? Wake up, Parker, and quit your whining. Every one of these nutjobs used to be a nice person, until, oh, an alien symbiote came along and possessed them, or they stumbled into a wire and got some electrical powers, or a nuclear reactor blew up and welded a bunch of mechanical arms to their spine." Jameson throws his cigar down, angrily grinds it into the carpet. "Your girl isn't special in_ that _regard, Pete. She's no different from the rest of them. Except for one thing, the one single thing that separates her from the rest of them – the camera loves her."_

Peter blinks in disbelief. "What?"

Jameson shrugs. "She's photogenic as all hell. Comes with having been a model, I guess, but there it is. Why do you think we've plastered pictures of her all over the paper? From the second she showed up on that tape, people were fascinated by her. The lady's got star quality. Everybody loves a bad girl."

"You realise, Jonah, that since you no longer employ me, there's not much that's stopping me from punching your lights out right about now," Peter says, his voice a low growl.

Jameson shrugs. "Go ahead and try, kid. Doesn't change a thing. And you know, I'm not one for psychobabble, but if you ask me?" He leans forward, arms straight, leaning on the arms of Peter's chair, staring straight into the younger man's narrowed brown eyes. "You're not nearly as angry with me as you are with her, with Otto Octavius, and with yourself. You're pissed off about this whole situation, and who could blame you? But don't try and shoot the messenger, Parker. I'm just giving the _public what it wants. And what it wants right now? Is your wife, the supervillain. _Deal with it."_ Jameson straightens up, rearranges his tie with dignity, turns on his heel and leaves._

Robbie, who has been observing the exchange in silence, watches Jameson leave, then turns back to Peter, who slumps down in his seat, head down, energy lost. "He doesn't mean to be cruel, Parker," Robbie tries. "You know what Jonah's like, he's…" He trails off, noticing that Peter is not responding. He tries again: "You know, Peter, people do expect the Bugle_ to take a certain stance on the issues –"_

A burble of despairing laughter. "Oh. She's an issue, now," comes the broken whisper.

Robbie falls silent, arms folded, watching Peter closely, unsure what to do, to say. "Are you okay, Peter?" he finally asks. "I mean, I know things are…things are rough. But are you okay?"

__

Peter looks up sharply; his red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes meet Robbie's. He jumps to his feet and, without another word, or even a look back, walks briskly out of the office.

When the tears finally come, he'll be damned if it happens in the office of J. Jonah Jameson.

****

I stand before the full-length mirror in the shadows of my parents' room, stripped to the waist, turning this way and that. No matter what angle I examine myself from, the scar she left is still visible.

Unfair to think of it as _her_ doing, of course. That vile fashion designer was the one who really inflicted it upon me. But Mary Jane - Mary Jane was the one who left her mark upon my skin. This twisted, black mouth in my flesh, leprous lips sewn together with rough black thread. It's healing rather quickly, being absorbed into me at a frightening rate. Like her.

Astonishing, and unnerving, how easy it is to fall backwards into intimacy. How hard it is to remember what it was like to live in this house alone, not to hear her singing in the shower each morning, her tread on the stair, the delirious rise and broken fall of her voice. She has left her imprint on this house in the same way she has left her imprint on my body; wet towels that smell of flowers draped over the radiator, a pair of boots kicked off on the living room rug, a brassiere hanging on the bathroom's towel rack. This past week of being shut inside the house, waiting for my body to heal, has revealed to me these details, these minor, unremarkable details that I might otherwise never have noticed. I have never really cohabited with a woman before; such emblems of domesticity, the most usual thing in the world to other men, are wholly alien to me – yet not entirely unpleasant.

With Mary Alice, there was no time to get to know one another in this unglamorous way. The bloom never faded from our romance, because it was cut so pitifully, painfully short. I loved her, and I lost her, and then I lost her again, this time forever, to the twin ravening hounds of Sickness and Death.

And Stunner? Stunner was a fantasy. My fantasy, her fantasy. A dream within a dream. To imagine her cooking breakfast, or warbling songs in the shower, or leaving undergarments strewn around the bathroom, is laughable. How could a virtual reality creation ever be domestic? How could a fantasy survive in such a prosaic environment? She would have blown away, a wisp of stardust on the wind.

Doctor Trainer. Perhaps she bears the closest comparison. Loyal as a doberman, chaste as the moon. I strung her along, allowed her to serve me – for that was all she wanted from life – filled her with false hopes, unlikely dreams. She told me things I wanted to hear, and never demanded anything, even so much as a kiss, for her troubles. I gave her nothing. I shouldn't have been surprised to find that that was all she left me with, in the end.

The women of my life, then. At least, the women I remember. A short, lonely parade of fleeting beauty, of death and disappearance, of illusion and abandonment.

I had a dream, tonight. I suppose you could call it erotic in nature. In the dream, I was making love to a woman whose face and body kept changing, identity subsuming identity, countenance subsuming countenance. She had elements in her of both Mary Alice and Stunner, and the feel of her underneath me was as real as the mirror before me now. It should have been arousing, but there was nothing in the dream but a feeling of ineffable sadness; even as I possessed her, I knew I had lost her, and whatever I embraced was already gone.

I won't think about this. I refuse to think about this.

I glance at the glowing hands of the clock; it informs me that it is nearly a quarter past two in the morning, and yet, I don't feel in the least bit tired. Shrugging into a robe, my tentacles carry me softly down the stairs, into the living room.

Painted with shadows, she sleeps, amid rumpled sheets, on my couch. Her hair is a black stream, covering half of her face; I could almost delude myself into believing that she were that other black-haired Mary, Mary Alice, back from the dead and slumbering peacefully under my roof. But of course she isn't. I know that. I do.

I just wish I didn't have to remind myself of it, that's all.

I wander across the living room in the direction of the kitchen, stretch out a tentacle, set the kettle to boil. I lean back against the counter, uttering a sigh as I arch my neck back, run a hand through my hair.

"Hey."

I snap open my eyes, lower my head to peer through the gloom.

Mary Jane is sitting up on the couch, one leg tucked underneath her, the only sign of her recent repose her ruffled hair and slowly-blinking eyes.

"How're you feeling?" she asks.

For one confused moment, I think she is asking me about my dream; then, of course, I realise that she is actually referring to the bullet wound. "Quite well," I reply, my tentacles busying themselves behind me, turning off the kettle, grabbing a cup, pouring the steaming water. "At least, the pain seems to have faded."

"It always does," she says cryptically. She slides her fingers through her hair, lets it fall back around her shoulders, looks down at a pool of moonlight on the floor. "You're up kinda late," she says.

"As are you."

"Yeah, well." She shrugs. "I don't sleep very well, most nights." A pause. For a minute, I think she is about to invite me to sit beside her. It's not an altogether horrible idea. Stay up, together. Tea. Television. I used to do that, sometimes, with Mother, on the nights when she didn't want to sleep next to my father, the nights following particularly hideous arguments. We would sit in this very living room, huddled under a blanket, watching television until the sun came up and she would start breakfast, clattering pots and pans, her eyes darkened with fatigue.

No. It's not a horrible idea, at all. In fact, I hope she will ask me. I feel oddly shaky, and there is a warmth about her that I feel sure would be most beneficial right now.

But she doesn't ask me. This is what she says instead:

"Hey. I've got an idea. Let's go out."

I blink. "Now? Right now?"

"Yeah."

"It's almost two-thirty in the morning."

She gazes back at me, lazy and insouciant. "Yeah?"

"And…you're not tired?"

"Are you?"

We look at each other for a long, silent minute, my back and tentacles braced against the kitchen counter, she motionless on the couch.

"Did you have anywhere in particular in mind?" I ask.

I never knew the _Bugle_ offices could be so quiet.

Like a ghost town. Papers strewn over cramped wooden tables. Motivational posters and _Far Side_ cartoons blu-tacked to the walls, peeling away like dried skin. Cold coffee mugs perched on desks, a couple with lipstick stains on the rim. I pick one up, fit my own lips over the imprint, try to imagine what it feels like to be the woman who works here, can't, and fling the mug aside.

Otto looks too big for this place, uncomfortable, his tentacles scraping the floors and ceiling. His shadow moves past the picture window, momentarily blocking the city lights beyond; he turns his head sharply, and the lights skitter across the lenses of his glasses. "You're certain you know where the safe is?"

"'Course I do," I scoff, picking up a broadsheet displaying a mockup of tomorrow's headline – nothing about me, oh ho, we'll see about _that_ – shred it with Brenda's claws, and keep walking. "My husband used to work here. I used to come visit him all the time…" I trail off, images of Peter flashing into my brain, unwanted as police sirens. I shake my head, shake the images off into the darkness.

I think Otto looks a little perturbed, too, but he turns his face away and I can't tell if that's really the case. With a sudden motion, he sweeps one of his tentacles outwards, smashing to smithereens every desk, chair and sundry object that was unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity. "We may as well get started," he declares.

I grin, my pulse rate rising, my body remembering the fantastic high of the fashion show's destruction, how amazing it felt to be able to finally lash out like that. And I do it again, Brenda whipping around, diving through the air, and shattering one of the lighting panels overhead, snowflakes of glass raining down onto the floor. It's so juvenile to enjoy this. Petty vandalism, that's all it is. But the _Daily Bugle_ is a petty publication, so it's not as if it deserves much more than that.

Besides, Otto looks like he's enjoying it. And that's really why I suggested we come here in the first place. Guy needs a little unpredictability, a little something spontaneous, to keep his spirits up. He looked kind of sad when I woke up tonight. Kind of lost. I didn't like to see him looking that way. Made me feel off-balance, unprotected. But now he seems okay again, so there's nothing to worry about, nothing to feel but the rush as we tear the world, everybody else's world, into tiny little pieces.

As our tentacles lash around us, sending pieces of office furniture and shredded papers flying in their wake, I clamber atop one of the few unscathed desks, face the security camera mounted in the corner of the wall, and deliver a little speech I've been rehearsing in my head for a while now. Grandstanding? Maybe. But, hey, I'm a professional actress. And a true professional _never_ disappoints her public.

__

Her image translates well to black-and-white. Stark, lean, hungry. The single eye left uncovered by the patch, even bleached of color, burns like white flame into the grainy security-camera lens. You could go blind if you look at it too long.

"Hello, vultures," she begins, by way of greeting.

"Mary Jane Watson here, in case you'd forgotten me already. Otto Octavius is here, too, but he's a little too busy to make much of a statement right now, so I guess it's up to me to leave you all a little video valentine.

"Just wanted to let you know just how much I appreciated the coverage you gave me last Tuesday! Warmed my heart." The mockery seeps from her honeyed tones, poisoning the audio, a snake in the night. "Though I've gotta say, flattering as those pictures were, it was Jonah's little editorial that really caught my attention. I especially like the part about 'the inexplicable grudge I harbor against the industry that gave me so much'.

"Well, you're right, JJ. It did. It gave me a lot. A hell of a lot. I'm just doing my bit to pay it back, that's all. And since the Bugle_, as a media outlet, is part of that industry, well – consider this my thank-you note."_

An ear-shattering crash off-camera; Mary Jane twists around, a Cheshire-cat grin spreading across her face, before turning back to the camera. "Well, it appears Otto's found the safe. We'll just consider this our payment for your shameless exploitation of my image and call it a day, huh?" She winks. "Peace, kids."

A whiplike black blur speeds in front of the camera, the point of view of which erupts into a maelstrom of white static.

Jameson will discover this security tape placed neatly on his desk the next morning. It will be the only part of the Bugle_ headquarters that has been left intact._

Can you feel it? In the air? Whispering through your lungs, tingling in your limbs?

The shining chrome car has reached the top, the very top, of the raised wooden tracks. There's nothing up here. Nothing. Only air streaking past your cheek, tangling in your hair, and the stars up above, so bright and so close you could touch them, even if they'd only burn you to a cinder.

We've reached the top now. The climb has been arduous, unbearably steep and long and oh so slow. But we're here now. And if you want my advice, you'd better hold on tight. Because there's only one way to go from here. Only one direction to take, from this emptiness, this cool, clear emptiness we find here at the top.

We're heading down.

And we're heading down FAST! No time for regrets! No time for remorse! No time to feel anything, anything at all, other than the external stimuli that's pumping your heart, that's electrifying your brain! Your skin is on fire, your eyes are catherine wheels in your head, spinning around and around, trying to take it all in but not caring if you ever remember any of it, just so long as you feel it now, now, now. Don't think about the future. Don't think about the past. Don't think.

Just feel it.

Oh, _feel _it!

****

On Sunday – the day of sacred rest – we hit a plastic surgery clinic.

Not just any plastic surgery clinic, mind you. The Swanson Institute of Cosmetic Enhancement, to be precise. The most exclusive clinic in New York, a paen to the vanity of human wishes. Occupying the entirety of the fifteenth floor of a fashionable building in a fashionable neighborhood, it is a stark, slick, all-white series of offices, all white leather couches and flattering lighting and blown-up photographs of empty-eyed models.

It is a pleasure to lay waste to this revolting place. A pleasure to give myself up to its destruction, to leave thought and feeling behind.

Mary Jane and I have abandoned the subtle approach; half of the wall is missing by now, and most of the doctors and patients fled in terror, a mass of overprivileged humanity screaming and sobbing and packing themselves into already-crowded elevators. Amongst the assorted debris of bricks and plaster are wall charts, scalpels, article of discarded clothing, jewellery, all scattered across what remains of the shining white marble floor. An alarm is shrilly crying out in protest against our actions, but does nothing whatsoever to stop us.

Imagine the tableau: I, at the decimated wall safe, busily stuffing money into a sack (the monetary reward of this venture is of course beside the point, but given that currency is the only language people like our targets understand, it only makes sense to hit them where it will hurt most). Cowering behind the half-collapsed front desk several feet away, a little secretary, dressed in a white smock now grey with dust and grime, tears streaking down her pretty face and tangling in her chestnut hair.

And perched on the edge of the desk, gazing down upon her like a vast and beautiful bird of prey, her tentacle curled around her shoulders and apparently gazing down too – Mary Jane. Crouching on her haunches, arms resting casually on her knees, a cat playing with a mouse. The secretary seems to be trying to say something, but the tears are coming too thick, too fast. Mary Jane smiles gently, and her tentacle snakes down, strokes the secretary's hair, tucks a lock of it behind her ear; the girl's shrieks build in intensity.

"Now, honey," Mary Jane says soothingly. "If we were gonna hurt you, don't you think we'd have done that already?"

The girl, huge-eyed, swallows her hysterical sobs and tries to follow. You can almost feel her tiny mind struggling to comprehend.

"All I want from you," Mary Jane continues, her voice a sing-song, a lullaby, "Is for you to stay right here until we leave – which is gonna be soon, all right? And you just wait right here until the cops show up. And when they do, you tell them just who it was who broke into this place. You tell them it was Mary Jane Watson and Doctor Octopus – or you can reverse the billing," she continues smoothly, hearing me give an annoyed grunt at this. "And you tell them that this wasn't about the money. You tell them that this wasn't just about wanton destruction. You tell them that this is about beauty. This is about what happens when you worship beauty. This is about what happens when you put beauty up on a pedestal. And it's about what happens when that pedestal gets kicked right the hell over."

She flashes the terrified girl a bright smile. "Can you tell them that for me, honey? Okay?"

The girl's head jerks, up and down, convulsively. Mary Jane smiles again, and straightens up in one smooth motion, standing straight and tall upon the ruined desk. "Otto!" she calls over to me. "We done?"

I close the sack, grasp it firmly in the grip of one of my tentacles. "We're done," I reply.

Mary Jane looks back down at the secretary. "We're done," she says cheerfully, blows the girl a kiss, and leaps down.

"…Aided and abetted by her mentor, Otto 'Doctor Octopus' Octavius, Watson has launched an all-out war upon the fashion and beauty industry, and it is precisely this choice of target that has sparked unexpected controversy in academic circles. While the police continue their manhunt for the pair, it is the socio-political ramifications of Watson's actions and words that have exerted a particular fascination over the culture. Dolores, would you say that Watson's expressed grievances are, as has been suggested, aberrant? That is to say, psychologically speaking?"

"Hardly, Steven," the tall, gray-haired academic responds, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. "This sort of dissatisfaction is common – to a much less extreme extent, of course – in many former models, who suddenly find themselves too old, or too overweight, or otherwise undesirable, and therefore without work. There comes a point in their lives when they realise the hollowness of the industry for which they worked, the exploitation inherent in the lives they led –"

"Hollowness? Exploitation?" interrupts the modelling agent, her earrings flashing jade-green as she tosses her hair. "Oh, please. You're trying to turn Watson, and by extension all former models, into some sort of victims. Nobody puts a gun to these women's heads and forces them to get paid for looking pretty, you know, and anyone who goes into this business not knowing the risks deserves everything she gets."

"It's precisely your business' narrow definition of the term 'looking pretty' that results in actions like those of Mary Jane Watson's," snaps the academic.

"Oh ho! Oh ho! So, lemme get this straight – it's all _society's_ fault that Watson is now an urban terrorist? It's all _society's_ fault that she turned to crime? Here's a thought – maybe it's got something to do with Doctor _Octopus_. You know, the guy who put the _tentacle_ in her back? The guy we all know is the one pulling her strings? Not such a feminist heroine when you think of her in those terms, is she? The adoring partner of a man whose body count is –" The agent turns to the serene-countenanced host, "What is it now, Steven? Somewhere in the seventies?"

"I am not saying that Otto Octavius is not a vicious murderer," states the academic. "I merely think that we ought to focus less on his involvement and more on what Watson is trying to say. There is no disputing the fact that Doctor Octopus has killed many people, and I agree, there's no excuse for that…"

"Change the channel," Mary Jane says abruptly.

I look up and around, surprised to see her there in the darkness, leaning over the back of the couch, the shadows and light of the television flittering across her face, through her eyes. "Up late again?"

"I told you, I don't sleep well." She walks around to the side of the couch, collapses beside me, legs flung over the arm, her head brushing my shoulder. "Change the channel, okay? This is boring."

Unusual; she generally likes to hear herself discussed in the media, absorbs the attention with childlike glee. Then I realise that the panel is still harping on about the subject of my crimes and misdemeanors, specifically that which involves loss of human life. I look down at Mary Jane, catch the trace of a furrow in her brow, and change the channel.

The image dissolves into black-and-white shadowplay; the soundtrack becomes a hiss of 1930s static. It takes me a moment to absorb the sight of rioting, torch-wielding villagers storming up a hill before I recognise the film: James Whale's _Frankenstein_. It's as good a distraction as anything else, so I put down the remote and watch in silence.

After a while, Mary Jane leans her head fully against my shoulder, her hair spilling down over the leather of my coat, as if in competition to see which is blacker, slicker. Involuntarily, my breath catches in my throat. Still keeping her eyes trained on the television, she shifts in her seat, her entire back leaning against my side now, her tentacle snaking around the back of the couch to rest on my chair-arm.

She doesn't move for a while after that, and I relax slightly. She is simply making herself comfortable. Probably too tired to realise the manner in which has invaded my space. Just her casual, unthinking way, most likely.

Another few minutes pass. And then I feel her fingers in my hair.

I jerk my head around to look down at her, my pulse quickening with something like indignation, something like nervousness. Something like that. "What do you think you're doing?" I snap.

She looks up at me through her eyelashes, not removing either her head from my shoulder or her fingers from my hair. "Just thinking," she says, her voice distant, almost somnambulistic. "Wondering…" She giggles. "Your hair."

"What about it?" I ask, my tones prickly, defensive.

"Why _did_ you have it in that dorky bowl-cut for so long? I always wanted to ask."

I blink. Only she would come up with a question so thoroughly random, so deeply irrelevant.

Why I find myself dignifying it with a response, I'll probably never know. "My mother," I say quietly, "Used to cut it that way for me when I was young. It took me…a long time to change anything that reminded me of her."

Mary Jane is quiet. She strokes my hair again, winding her fingers through the length of it, idly, as though it is something unconnected to me. "It looks much better this way," she finally declares. "_I_ like it better this way."

I am growing increasingly uncomfortable, aware that this touch is wrong, aware that her physical ease with me is wrong. Why is she touching me? And why doesn't it seem to mean anything, signify anything, to her? Doesn't she even think of me as a man?

Irritably, I push her hand away with a tentacle; she withdraws it, not visibly wounded by the rejection, just as unconcerned by that as she was by the touch itself. She watches, in silence, as Henry Frankenstein confronts his creature, torch in hand, roundly and openly rejecting his child.

"My dad was like that," she says, so softly that one could easily have missed it.

I don't know what to say. We've never discussed her past, not really, not in depth. I don't really know anything about her, and to be honest, I don't think it should matter. She left her past in ruins behind her – _I_ left her past in ruins behind her; her life is here, and now, and with me alone. Nobody else could lay claim to _this_ Mary Jane other than myself.

She is still talking, like one hypnotised, like a dying person giving their last confession. "He used to tell me I was dumb all the time. He was a writer, and a teacher, and he was smart. So I guess I sort of thought he must know…" She breaks off, shakes her head. "You don't want to know this," she mutters.

Several heartbeats of silence pass between us. When someone finally speaks, volunteers information, I am surprised to find that it is me. "Nothing I could do," my voice says, stiffly, strangled, so totally unused to such words, "Was ever good enough for _my_ father."

And we are quiet again, the only sound the muted, underwater-noise of the television set. After a while, she stretches out her tentacle, snaps the device off, and we are plunged into a total vacuum of sound.

"How's the bullet wound?" she eventually asks, her voice flat, uninflected, too loud after such an extended absence of noise.

I clear my throat. "Fine. Almost fully healed by now."

"Good," she whispers, closes her eyes for a half-moment. "'Cause we need to pick up the pace, I think."

"Pick up the pace?" I ask, wilfully misunderstanding.

"Keep moving, Otto. We've got to keep moving. The past…it's something that chases after you. But you can escape it. If you move fast enough…"

__

"- Were injured in the process, but no serious casualties have been reported," smarms the news anchor. "This latest attack was, of course, in keeping with the duo's chosen theme: Margaretha's, on Fifth Avenue, one of the most exclusive and expensive boutiques on the upper west side. This latest attack on the world of high fashion has spawned yet more spirited debate over the figure at the center of the controversy. Mary Jane Watson: modern-day Robin Hood, or conscienceless supervillain?"

The scene cuts to a Hollywood backlot, flatteringly lit and angled, in such a way as _to portray its subject, Timothy Hollander, as the cool, fascinating maverick artist he knows himself to be so well._

"Oh, she's an icon, for sure," Tim drawls, a cigarette dangling from his fingertips in what he probably imagines is a devil-may-care fashion, eyes hidden behind purple shades. "It was just that type of iconic quality I picked up on, the day I cast her in what is essentially the leading role of my upcoming film, Is This Desire? _(which I'm finishing filming at the moment, by the way, for a January release). She had that kind of – of –" He gestures wildly with his cigarette, as if searching for words, as if this interview were not entirely rehearsed._ " – Psychotic glamor _about her that all the really memorable_ _criminals of our time had. Billy the Kid had it, Bonnie and Clyde had it, the Green Goblin had it, and now Mary Jane Watson has it. She's completely insane, of course, totally and utterly bat_(BLEEP),_ but I feel I understand her, you know? I felt it when we met. We communed. It was a meeting of the minds. I for one wouldn't hesitate to cast her again."_

The scene cuts to a bustling city street, a series of rapid-fire, quick-cut interviews, slices of public opinion served in a palatable thirty-second format. "I think she's disgusting," sniffs an old lady. "Absolutely disgusting. A violent little thug. Let her rot in jail."

"I don't agree with the way she's doing it," one woman admits. "But I think what she has to say – I think she kind of has a point, with that."

"She's just a puppet," shrugs one twentysomething guy. "Everyone knows Doc Ock is making her do all this stuff. I can't hate her, but I can't, you know, support her either, because that'd be supporting him too."

"I don't care," says a young female student irritably, slinging her backpack over one shoulder. "Honestly, I think it's all just a publicity stunt she cooked up to, like, further her career. She was a model, you know? She just wants to stay famous, I think."

"MARY JANE WATSON RULES!" _three teenage girls squeal, clad in identical red T-shirts, blue jeans and green trench coats, with identical dyed-black hair. "Wooo! We love you, MJ!" whoops one. "You_ rock!_"_ _cries another._

Peter sits, slumped on the couch, staring at the television in a kind of stupor, made up of equal parts despair and disbelief. There is no way,_ he thinks to himself, _no way, that these people can possibly be talking about MJ. Not my MJ. They can't possibly have opinions on her. They can't possibly see her this way.

__

May Parker, from her station at the kitchen sink, glances around the corner, sees her nephew's lank posture, sees the incredulous look on his face. She bites her lip, turns back to the soapy dishes, rinses them under the cold tap. She probably shouldn't _say anything. It isn't really her business, after all. Peter is dealing with this the best he can._

But she knows he really isn't. He can do better than this. Much better.

Sighing, she peels off the pink rubber gloves, throws them down beside the sink, and saunters into the living room, sitting down next to him, taking up the remote, and switching off the television. "I don't know what you're watching that garbage for," she comments mildly.

"To be honest? Neither do I," Peter admits. "Feels like all these people know her better than I do, now. But at the same time – it's like I'm the only one left who knows her at all." He shakes his head, trying to reorganise the thoughts that have swirled within it for so many weeks now; finally, he buries it in his hands.

"It's almost October now, you know," May says gently.

"Yeah?" comes the muffled reply.

"I…would have thought that you would have been able to catch up to her by now."

Peter looks up, eyeing her with some suspicion. "What do you mean?"  
"Well…" May looks away, presses her soft, wrinkled hand against Peter's. "I don't mean to imply anything, Peter, but – if Mary Jane were any other villain, I mean to say if anybody else were doing the things she's doing now…you would have put a stop to it some time ago. Or at least tried to."

"Hey, I tried to stop her!" Peter protests, snatching his hand away. "I've still got the bruises to remember it by. She and Doc Ock practically polished that catwalk with my face."

May clucks her tongue in irritation; the boy is being deliberately obtuse now, and she knows it. "Are you honestly trying to convince me that after trying only once to capture her, you gave up on the effort entirely?"

Peter shifts in his seat. "No. I mean, it's not…that simple, exactly…" He falls silent. Then, roused again to defensiveness: "I mean, yeah, I know I should've been there to stop her from trashing all those places, and I tried, really I did. But I never made it there fast enough. She and Ock go in, steal stuff, tear the places apart and get out. Every time I arrived, she was already gone."

"Peter, that is an incredibly weak excuse," May replies sternly. "And it's beneath you to even try and convince me of it." She cups his chin in her hand, tilts his face, _with its wounded brown eyes and lines of unceasing worry, towards her. "You're afraid," she says gently. "You're afraid to see her again, afraid of what she might do, what you might do. You're afraid to look in her eyes and see that all is lost. But, Peter, whether you believe me or not, I am here to tell you that all is not lost. Not by any means. Mary Jane could very, very easily have killed you that night – and she didn't."_

"No," Peter says, and May is satisfied to see a dawning realisation behind his eyes. "You're right, no, she didn't."

"In fact," May continues, "She hasn't killed anyone." Her eyes narrow, the blue of the irises turning to steel. "And I can't imagine that Otto Octavius was behind that _particular decision." She lets her hand fall into her lap, where her eyes follow it; she sighs again. "I accepted long ago that Otto was lost. To me. To the world. And what he has done to her is so monstrous that I have to wonder if he can even distinguish any more between acts of good and evil."_

She looks up, back into Peter's eyes. "But Mary Jane isn't broken the way Otto is broken – not irretrievably, not yet. She's in fragments right now. She doesn't know who she is. But she can be put back together. She can find herself again, if there is someone willing to help her do that."

Peter bows his head. "I just don't…" he begins, then breaks off. "I just don't know if I'm strong enough, Aunt May," he whispers.

May reaches out, grasps his hand, tightly, letting him know she won't pull away. "Peter, you're the strongest person I think I've ever known."

Yesterday's job: a beauty spa uptown. Another notch on the belt. Another brick in the wall. Building up a real resume, here.

Funny how even rebellion ultimately falls into routine. How what was fun and exciting and life-affirming once, the first magical time, starts to feel like work, starts to wear on you. These jobs used to be my cheap thrill, but they're beginning to feel pretty expensive now that I'm getting used to them. That's the thing about whatever gets you high: you have to keep upping the dosage, have to _stay_ high, on one continuous loop, or you crash down to earth like nothing else.

I've noticed, lately, that that's what I do after Otto and I pull off yet another incredibly daring heist job – only hours later, I just crash. In the daytime, when he's by my side and there's debris all around and people are screaming hosannas to my name, I feel like my body is singing, like I'm sizzling with heat lightning, like there's nothing in the web of nerves around my brain but pure adrenaline, shooting through my spine. There's nothing to equal that feeling. Nothing.

And there's nothing to equal this flatness I feel afterwards. There's nothing to equal the blackness I see when I wake up in the middle of the night, the blackness all around me, inside me. This emptiness. This nothingness. This hole in the heart of me.

Even the media coverage afterwards doesn't do it for me any more – just the same talking heads, who don't know me, who think they've figured me out, commentating on my every move. They say I'm an icon. That's odd. I thought that's what I was _before_ Otto liberated me. I thought my iconic days were over. But everyone seems to know me better than I do.

I finally get out of bed around one AM. I can't remember if I slept at all or not. I have this feeling, like I dreamed something, but I don't know what it was, or even if I dreamed at all. The blankets are clustering around me, choking me. I kick them off, into the hot darkness, wondering why the hell the thermostat is turned up to such an insane degree. After getting up and checking it, though, I realise that it's just me.

I open the door a crack, and slip out into the hallway. From the heat of the room I just left, it's like diving into a pool of ice water. Immediately, I'm fully awake, fully alert; there's no way I could sleep now. I wish I had someone to talk to, or just to be with. Otto's asleep, and it wouldn't be fair to wake him up; even if I did, it wouldn't help. He doesn't talk to me, not really. Sometimes I feel like our conversations just consist of bouncing words off each other; nothing ever seems to stick. It never seems to really add up to anything, even when I want it to, when I hope it will. Otto doesn't really know me, and I don't think he really wants to know me.

With Peter, it was different. I stop, close my eyes, as the memories rush back into my brain, as they always do in these early hours, when my defenses are down. The sad, dull ache in the pit of my stomach whenever I think about him is the sickness of memory, the pain of having someone so close under your skin you feel you could touch them, but knowing you can't.

Peter. Before all of this, before it all went rotten and died. Peter was there. In the middle of the night, in the earliest hours of the morning, and I could talk to him any time I needed to. We sat up in our bed, the goosedown covers bunched up all around us, his bare feet sticking out at the end of the quilt, and we'd talk. About everything, everything there ever was. And sometimes we'd not talk; sometimes we'd touch, the lightest of strokes, fingertips streaking along a jawbone, an arched neck, a halo of tangled hair, as the sunlight seeped into the room. Sometimes it led to quickening breaths, sweat, hungry mouths pressing and feeding on each other; but other times, it remained a ballet of touch, nothing more, just a fascination with each other, expressed through the fingertips, seeing each other through our senses, like those struck blind.

Oh God. I hurt. I hurt and I hurt and I hurt. Somebody make it stop. Find me a distraction. Make Otto wake up, strike the house with lightning, I don't care. I thought I killed this pain. I thought I made it die.

It _is_ dead. It's just a memory. That's all. Only a memory of pain. I don't really feel this. I don't feel a thing.

Not a goddamn thing.

Calm. Placid. Sedated.

I'm fine. I'm good. I'm Mary Jane Watson, damn it. I'm a supervillain. And everything's fine. Brenda wraps herself around my waist, curls around my shoulders, pets my hair. I smile, and stroke her softly.

So. Here I am, walking after midnight. How very Patsy Cline of me. I sigh, lean against the cool wall, wrap my arms around my shoulders. The house is so quiet. I'm the only conscious person left in a cold, sleeping world.

Yeah. Okay, yeah. _There's_ something to do. Something to kill a few hours before dawn. I'll go up to the roof, watch the lights in the distance; watch as the dark fingers of the night draw slowly away from the city, as the sunlight slides across the slick metal surfaces and the rest of the world wakes up. And when I go downstairs, Otto'll have breakfast ready, probably, and all the shadows will disappear, and I'll feel steady again.

I scan the ceiling for the trap-door leading to the attic; amongst the dust and cobwebs, I finally catch sight of the dangling rope. I stretch Brenda up, curl her claws around it, pull; the rickety wooden staircase descends from on high, and I climb up, slowly, quietly.

The attic. Cool and silent. A tiny little boxed-in rectangle of termite-eaten wood and dusty cardboard boxes, their shadows falling across the floorboards in the wake of the moonlight slithering through the grime-soaked window. I take a cautious step, noticing the tiny hurricanes of dust that fly up around my feet as they touch the creaking floor; I'm so absorbed in trying not to make a sound, in fact, that I don't notice the low, flat wooden box right in front of me until I slam my left shin right into it. The pain shoots up my leg and forces its way out through a loud and filthy curse, as I drop to the ground, clutching my leg and groaning. I look over at the culprit, glaring at the box as if it had intentionally hurt me – and I notice, then, that it's been knocked over on its side, its contents spilling out across the floor.

Nothing really that spectacular. Nothing of particular note. Not especially revealing of anything – like, it's not photos of Otto's ex-girlfriends or his old stuffed bear or anything like that.

Just some records. Large, bulky cardboard record sleeves, their colors faded with time, covered with a fine sheen of dust. They don't look like the kind of thing Otto would choose to listen to. I pick them up, examine the sleeves in the low light: female singers, mostly, torchy types. Eartha Kitt, Peggy Lee, Julie London. _Lots_ of Julie London. I guess Mrs Octavius – because that's obviously who these belonged to – was a fan. The side of my mouth quirks into a smile; she and my mom probably would've gotten along.

Some of these records are really great, real dynamite stuff. I don't know what Otto's thinking, keeping them hoarded away up here in the attic, exposed to heat and cold and probably rats and things, too. I gaze at the cover photos, of the women, smiling and glamorous in that past-era-lounge-lizard kind of way, their hair and make-up immaculate, elegantly posed. I'm seized with a sudden desire to listen to these records, to fill up the silence before dawn with their sweet voices, voices of the past.

I look around, gambling on the probability of there being a record player up here too, and lo and behold, there is, shoved unceremoniously away in a corner, behind a bunch of empty cardboard boxes. I haul it out, blow the dust away from it; it's old, too, most likely as old as the records themselves, a big Victrola kind of thing, a gramophone, really, with the big brass horn and everything. I crank it up, slow at first, then fast, until the spinning black disc in the center achieves enough momentum to play me something. Fanning the record sleeves out in front of me with the hand not turning the lever, I pick one of the Julie Londons, slide it out, place it carefully on the turntable.

The crackle, the hiss of old music. And then, the slow dive. The smooth swell of a backing jazz band, and then the low, sweet, honey-husked voice, insinuating itself into the ear, rising and falling like warm ocean waves, soothing as a mother's lullaby, even as the words themselves whisper their quiet, resigned sadness. "_It begins to tell, round midnight, round midnight. I do pretty well, 'til after sundown…"_

I close my eyes, lay back on the floor, not caring about the dust or dirt, letting every note wash over me. My lips move in time to the music, whisper the words. "_Darling, I need you; lately I find – you're out of my arms, I'm out of my mind…_"

It's such a stupid thing, really. To let something as dumb and innocent as an old song slip past your defenses, past the ice wall. But I have to squeeze my eyes closed, anyhow, hold them tightly shut, wind my arms around my body, as if to keep everything contained, inside.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" a voice growls in the darkness.

My eyelids fly open; I struggle to sit up, regain my composure. Otto's head and shoulders face me through the trap-door; his eyes are hidden behind his glasses, but I can feel their blazing heat nevertheless. His voice is sharp, cold, a stab with an icicle.

"You have no right to be up here," he says, teeth clenched; his tentacles swarm up through the doorway, plant themselves firmly on the floorboards, haul him up in one smooth motion. I blink; I don't know if it's because I'm tired or what, but I honestly can't think why he might be angry with me. "I –" I begin, but he cuts me off.

"Do you imagine that everything in this house is your property, Mary Jane?" he asks, biting down on my name. "Do you imagine that because circumstance has brought us together that you have a right to all that is me, all that is mine?"

"I don't know –" I try.

He slams a tentacle down on the floor; the dust skitters and jumps, and so do I. "Those – are – _my –_ _mother's – records!_" he thunders. "They were _her_ property, not yours! You had no right – no _right_ – " Another slam; despite myself, I cringe, hunching my limbs closer to my body " – To pry into my life in this way. What is up here in the attic is up here _for a reason_. If I had wanted to parade my memories before you, Mary Jane Watson, _don't you think I would have done so long ago?!"_

I've never, never seen him so angry with me before. Not even in the beginning, before we were – whatever we are now. The moonlight glints off his teeth, giving him a bestial aspect – fanged, carnivorous. He could kill me right now. I'm sure of it. He's killed people for less. Nervously, cowering, I stand up. "Otto…" I venture, my voice quavering. "I didn't mean to pry. I just, I was going to the roof, and I found –"

"What did you find, Mary Jane? Hmm? Something that was not yours to toy with, not yours to even touch. My mother's property is _never_ to be touched by the likes of you."  
And that's when I start to get pretty damn angry myself. "I didn't do anything wrong," I snap. "And what the hell is that supposed to mean? 'The likes of me'? Just what _are_ 'the likes of me', exactly?"

"If this attic weren't so small, Mary Jane…" Otto growls dangerously; his tentacles extend silently through the gloom, and I feel them wind, threateningly, behind my back, ready to enfold me.

I decide to try and defuse the situation, try to placate him. "Otto," I say gamely, taking a few hesitant steps forward. "Look. If I _did_ do something wrong here, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to – you know, _offend_ you or anything like that, or disrespect your mom's memory. I hope you can…" I place my hand lightly on his arm.

Bad move, apparently. Otto snarls like a wildcat, and before I can blink, before I can think, a rush of air speeds past me and something shoves me away from him, sends me skidding across the floor. I look up, not injured, but in shock; Brenda curls herself around me protectively; Otto reels his tentacle back in, and the four of them writhe and lash angrily behind him.

"_Stop that!"_ he barks. "Why must you _do_ that, all the time? Why do you keep _touching_ me like that?!"

Okay, now I'm lost. "A - all the…?" I try to make some sense of this.

"So insidious," he hisses. "Always finding ways to _do_ that, excuses to…Pfah!" he waves a hand dismissively, turning away from me, folding his arms. "It isn't right," he mutters, "It isn't right."

I haul myself, shakily, to my feet, with considerable help from Brenda. I feel broken inside, shattered; I could cry, I feel sure I could, but no tears seem to come. "Otto," I start, haltingly. My voice fails; I hang my head, closing my eyes, trying to gather the pieces of myself together. Finally, there's nothing to say other than: "I wanted to feel closer to you." I don't even know if it's true or not.

Otto spins around, his face once again resembling the wrath of God. "Closer to me? You wanted to feel _closer to me?"_ he bellows. "That, Mary Jane, is the biggest laugh of all. You will never be close to me, Mary Jane, because you are not willing to go where I go, to do what I do, to take that final, irreversible step. You are not willing to follow me into places that are not pretty, not glamorous, not all childish fun and games. You are not prepared to make the sacrifices that I do. You wish to feel closer to me, Mary Jane Watson? Then _kill somebody!"_

He flings this last at me, before swarming down the attic steps, slamming the door in his wake. I stand there, shaking, before my legs give way from underneath me and I land, roughly, on my ass, on the floor. I hear the faint slam of the front door downstairs, and know that he's gone. Even though I know what I want to do, I wait for what seems a long time until I'm certain the house has settled around me, until I'm sure he won't be back.

I get up, again, leaning on Brenda, my last line of support. I walk, zombified, over to the trap-door, pull it open, head downstairs. I've got the kitchen in my mind, the refrigerator, the bottle of champagne I saved all those weeks ago from the limousine, back when all this was fun. It's gone flat now, of course. The champagne, I mean. Flat, but it's still alcohol.

Right now, the alcohol is all that really matters.

The lights of the city swirl around me, the sound a textured miasma of car horns and babbling voices in my ears, but none of it touches me. High above the city, swarming across the rooftops, all I can feel is my own fury, white-hot, blinding.

How _could _she? How could she _dare?_

Those were my memories she was playing, listening to so idly, up in that attic. My memories, floating out of the old gramophone – my mother, standing at the kitchen stove or hanging out the washing on the line outside, singing those songs; or when she would hide in the attic from him, and take me with her, and we would crouch there in the dust with the record player turned down low, so that the silken voices were reduced to only a breath of sound. After she died, I moved them all up there so that those memories could never be disturbed, so that those records could never be played again, so that the feelings and images I attached to them would be preserved forever. (I slither down a cracked brick wall, into an alleyway.)

Stunner would never have dared. She would have known, instinctively, that there are some things sacred even to me. Even though I've never explained what Mother meant to me to Mary Jane – only mentioned her, briefly, that one time on the couch – she should know. She should be able to…to _sense_ it. Or at least had intelligence enough not to presume that we are to share _everything_ in that house. (My tentacles carry me out, down the deserted stretch of street ahead, and into a curving concrete tunnel. Close to the station; I can hear the trains howling, distantly, at the back of my mind.)

This constant invasion of my space – it maddens me. I meant what I said to her, about the manner in which she is forever _touching_ me. It's one thing to ride on my back, when necessity dictates such an action, or to stitch up a gaping wound in my side; it's another thing to believe she has the right to bestow caresses, uninvited and unnerving, whenever she sees fit. She doesn't know what those caresses do to me. Or perhaps she does.

She needs to be careful. She seems to believe she has me on a leash, that I'm tame now, some sort of pet. Not so, my girl. Not so. I made you what you are. You don't own me. I determine the boundaries between us, not you.

And, do you know, I didn't even realise that I wanted her to kill until the words had been spoken aloud. The more I reflect upon it, however, the truer I see that it is. She should be prepared to kill for me. She should care at least that much. It isn't an unreasonable expectation. It's practically an insult that she hasn't done it yet, hasn't even attempted it yet; it's as if there's a part of her, some secret part, that she is withholding from me, that she won't share, and I cannot have that. To look at her, into those eyes, and know that she hasn't surrendered everything to me, that she has erected a dividing line between us – the thought drives me to distraction. No, I will not stand for that. She must kill for me.

__

I would kill for _her_…

"You know, Ockie, it must be said – moonlight becomes you."

…And the opportunity to do so may have already arrived.

Slowly, I turn, look up to the curving roof of the tunnel, that hated voice prickling my skin, shooting along my spine. There, amongst the faded gangland graffiti, the blue and the red. Crouched upside-down like the repellent little insect he truly is, gazing down upon me with white, impudent eyes – Spider-Man.

A growl slithers up through my throat, a guttural sound without verbal equivalent; I thrash a tentacle in his direction, lashing out as hard as I possibly can, but am rewarded only with the crack of concrete, as he dances effortlessly away. I am not in the mood for this. I'm tired, angry, unfocused. Crushing him would be a delight, but not this evening.

He raises his arms above his head, makes a T-shape with his hands. "Whoa, whoa. Time out. I came here to talk."

My tentacles writhe, on the defensive, as if I would ever drop such a stance around him. "You and I have nothing to talk about."

"Oh, see, I think we do." He drops down to the ground, several metres away from me – clever boy, don't get too close. "We never really talk anymore, Otto. What with all the hubbub of the last few months, it never seems to be just you and me. I figured we needed some 'alone time'. Some guy talk." He lowers his head, gazes at me in what I assume is meant to be a significant manner. "Without the lady around."  
I tense. Mary Jane. This is about Mary Jane.

"I'll assume that silence means I should go on?" He saunters a little closer, hands behind his back. "Okay, then. To cut directly to the chase, I'm prepared to make you an offer. A definite one-time-only deal." He lowers his arms to his sides, narrows his eyes. "Send Mary Jane Watson home, safe and unharmed, and I won't beat the holy hell out of you when the time comes to send you back to the looney bin."

Involuntarily, a touch hysterically, I begin to laugh. "I thought we'd settled this long ago? The night of the fashion show. I thought she'd made her decision quite clear, Spider-Man. She chose me. Not you."

"Oh, yeah, I'd accept that. _If_ I believed it really was _her_ decision. Which I don't. Not for a second."

"I couldn't care less what you believe, boy," I snarl, turning around, determined not to continue this idiotic conversation any longer.

"You really think she deserves the kind of life you can give her?"

I stop, look back around. A slow burn of rising anger, returning for the second time this night, kindles inside me.

"She still has a chance, Otto," he goes on, his tone now, amusingly enough, almost a plea. "She hasn't seriously hurt anyone yet. If you're at all concerned with her welfare – and I'm sort of banking on the idea that you are, in your half-baked kind of way – you'll give her up to the police. They'll go easy on her. I'll see to it that she –"

I feel my lips curling back, into an animal snarl. "You," I say slowly, "Are asking me to _betray_ her."

He shakes his head. "No, I –"

"You want me to _sell her out_. Is that it?"

So strange, the way a mood is mutable. Only minutes ago, I was cursing her name, cursing the day I met her. Now, the very thought of going against her, of giving her up to this repellent little cretin, whips me into a blind fury. As if _he_ could ever hope to understand her. As if he could ever show her the things I've shown her, about the world, about herself. He wants to put her back, safe and sound, into her cosy little boxed-in life. He wants to take her away from me.

"You miserable, miserable, _miserable_ little _toad,_" I hiss. "The very fact that you would even approach me with such an offer is an insult to both her and me. You don't know us – either of us. If you did, you would realise that she doesn't want your kind of life. And even if she did – I would never, ever, surrender her to _you_."

I shoot my tentacles out, making an infuriated grab for him, but once again, he skitters away, onto the tunnel wall. As he crawls towards the edge of the tunnel, vanishing into the night, his voice echoes behind him, backwards into my head.

"Trust me, Doc. I _won't_ be making that offer again. That was the last warning, right there. Next time I see you – or her – I'll do whatever I have to."

I spot her, sitting there, hunched and lonely, long before I actually alight on the roof of my house.

She doesn't seem to acknowledge my presence; merely stares out over the back yard, across the sky, at the faraway buildings, the faint glimmer of lights. Her hair is streaming in the fierce wind, whips and lashes her face, delicate as a sliver of pearl in the darkness. She is huddled beside the chimney, her limbs folded in upon themselves to preserve what little warmth there is; she is motionless for a long time, and then I see her tentacle raise a clear bottle to her lips, and she takes a long pull off its slender neck. I catch the scent of alcohol on the wind, and frown.

"You know you're not supposed to be drinking," I say reproachfully.

She looks up, her eyes bleary, unfocused, and it is immediately apparent that she is drunk. "What?"

"I wished for you to keep your mind sharp. Unclouded." I move to stand beside her; she makes no effort to rise, simply turns her gaze back out towards the city, and takes another swig from the bottle.

A long silence. I sigh, and sit down beside her, following her fixed stare. "We shouldn't be arguing, you and I," I begin, my voice uncharacteristically faltering. "We aren't each other's enemy. Not when we have real enemies we need to focus on fighting," I add, scowling, as the memory of the evening's encounter with the arachnid flashes across my mind.

Mary Jane snorts with laughter. "I guess that's all I'm gonna get by way of an apology, huh?"

This presumption on her part irks me. "You will not receive an apology because I do not owe you one. I'm not here to indulge your finer feelings."

"No, there's nobody around to do that, is there," she says thickly, taking another gulp from the bottle.

I could easily take the champagne from her, throw it away, but I don't. Instead, I simply watch her, observe her in the calm and peaceful hush before the dawn. She seems very young all of a sudden, a thing easily bruised, easily wounded; and, unbidden, my mind returns to Spider-Man's words. Something about how she still has a chance. Something about the kind of life I can give her.

My eyes flick down to the tentacle, weaving unsteadily over the tiles of the roof, as intoxicated as she. That's the kind of life I can give her, the kind of life a deformity can bestow. I wonder if she drank like this before I came along. I wonder if she knew the terrible highs and lows, the jagged peaks and endless descents, of existence before I showed them to her. And I wonder, very briefly, whether or not it is a good thing that she knows them now.

Behind my glasses, I close my eyes tightly, turn away from her. I will not, I will not, I _will not_ allow Spider-Man, of all people, to plant a seed of doubt in my mind. I don't subscribe to his vision of reality, as he does not subscribe to mine; but she has made her choice. She has. And so what if the circumstances under which she made it were not ideal; so what if she was exhausted, and anguished, and frightened? Under what other circumstances, I ask you, does one make the decisions that determine one's life?

I've made her life better, richer by far.

I haven't destroyed her.

"Mary Jane," I say slowly, my eyes closed, my mind formulating the words at the same time as my mouth, "You don't have to kill anyone if you don't want to. It was…" I swallow. "It was unfair of me to demand that of you."

The words hang in the cold air, uncomfortable and awkward. I wonder if perhaps she did not hear. Then she shakes her head.

"No. No, it's okay, Otto. It's okay. You were right." She hugs her knees to her chest, stares down at her feet. "I've been gutless my whole life," she says, her voice low, oddly deep. "Everyone always knew it. I tried to look strong, but nobody was ever convinced. My dad knew. He saw it. He saw I was just a, a…" She waves her hand "Just a cream puff, so he didn't need to…he didn't need to try not to tread on me. But I can be strong now. I can. I can do it. I can do…what you said I should do."

I shiver; the wind is beginning to bite, turn even colder. It will rain again soon. "Do you want to go in?" I enquire.

She shakes her head again. "No." She lies back, stretches her body out beside me, feline in the gloom. "Look at the stars," she says dreamily. "They're so close up here. Right up here, at the highest peak. You could reach up and touch them if you didn't know they burned."

I settle back, leaning on my elbows, watching the night skies. "The Big Dipper," I say automatically, recounting the names of these stars, these stars I watched so often from my windows in the house below us. "Ursa Minor. Ursa Major. Orion."

"The Milky Way," she joins in, so unexpectedly I cut myself off, glance across at her. "Sirius. Betelgeuse. Regulus. Andromeda." She laughs, looks over at me, and I detect a hint of challenge in her eyes. "My husband," she explains. "Science teacher. He knew all the names of the stars, all the constellations." She looks back up. "He used to say he'd discover a new constellation some day, one with only three stars in the sky. One of them would be him. One of them would be me. One of them would be our little girl."

I sit up. I stare at her, my eyes wide. My heart seems to freeze in my chest, forcing the blood back through my veins. "Your…" My voice fails. I give it another try. "You have a child?"

Mary Jane is very, very quiet. Deathly quiet. For a very long time.

"No," she finally says, and her voice is the softest thing I have ever heard, softer than the rain, than the wind. "No, I don't." She closes her eyes. "She was a little girl," she whispers. "She was so beautiful. All the while I carried her inside me, I could feel her as she took her shape, and I could feel that she was beautiful. You wouldn't think, would you, that you could feel beauty? But you can.

"And we argued over what to name her. Good-natured arguing. But he won. We named her after his aunt. We called her May. _My_ choice was Brenda. I think it's a good name. Brenda.

"And…she was gone. When I woke up, because I was so tired, because there was so much pushing and breathing and pain…they told me she was gone. I held her for only a moment, and then she was just not there. It was over. Gone. Gone away."

And more silence. The words have evaporated inside my mouth. My whole body feels numb. I don't know what to say to her. I look at her, try to imagine her pregnant, try to imagine her with a baby, a dead baby. "I have always," I say, my voice thick and slow, painfully formal, "Had the greatest respect for mothers. I imagine you would have been wonderful."

She shrugs, languidly. "We'll never know now."

No more words. Nothing left to say, really. She sits up; her tentacle tosses the champagne bottle into the air, and as it tumbles through space, the tentacle swishes to one side, smashing it. The eruption of glass fills the air, like glittering shards of the night itself, sharp-edge diamonds, falling silently down to the grass below. We watch it fall, then, with a sigh, she hauls herself to her feet, brushing off her jeans.

"I've decided," she says quietly. "Who it's gonna be. You know Timothy Hollander? That jerk-off film-maker? The one on that show the other night, talking trash about me, and how he and I have a connection and all that crap? It'll be him. He's famous. Make a big splash. The media'll love it."

Slightly unsteady on her feet, she saunters across the roof, towards the trap-door leading down into the attic. Something seizes me, seizes hold of my heart, as I watch her go; impulsively, I call out: "Mary Jane?"

Halfway down the stairs, she stops, looks over her shoulder with half-lidded eyes. "Yeah?"

I pause. I had something to say. There was something I felt she should hear, a phrase, a word, a magic incantation, some perfect arrangement of syllables that would make everything all right. But I've forgotten it now. If I ever knew it to begin with. "No." I shake my head. "Never mind."

She stands there, perfectly still, and she looks at me with tired and unreadable green eyes, the wind blowing the strands of hair across her face, a shining black veil. At last, she says, ever so quietly, "You know something, Otto? As far as I'm concerned, everyone can go to Hell except you and me."

She turns away, and vanishes down the stairs, leaving me alone to face the approaching dawn.

Sweat, soaking my skin, and I'm shaking like a junkie. My hands are a blur, they're trembling so hard. My head, still pounding with the hangover – oh, I should've waited another day for this, another day or more – is strangely light; must be the air up here, so high, in this beautiful, lush green garden.

The smell of roses, thick in my nostrils. I feel so far away. So far away from the smashed lights, the wrecked sound equipment, the spools of brown celluloid draped all around the bushes, the pages of script scattered to the winds, the weaselly little man on his knees in front of me, my tentacle wrapped firm and tight around his throat, sobbing what may well be his last breath.

I tilt my head to one side, close my eyes, let the wind catch my hair, lift it around my shoulders, ripple around my face. "A roof garden," I say, my voice far away in my own ears. "Pretty. The script must've undergone some revisions since I read it. I don't remember a scene in a roof garden back when _I_ was Bethany." I open my eyes, and my face feels rigid, hard, frozen in place. "Do you think I'd still be a good Bethany, Tim? Or am I ugly enough for Donna now?"

Tim can't reply, not sensibly; his whole body is shuddering, seizing up with fear. "Oh God oh God oh God I'm sorry I'm sorry I don't know what I didn't mean please oh Jesus oh Mary Jane please no please no please no…"

"Shut up," I say harshly. "No talking."

This should – rightfully should - be my most perfect moment.

I waited all day. Slept maybe three hours back home, snuck out of the house before Otto was even awake. I knew he'd want to come with me, come and see for himself just what kind of a job I would do. The thought of having him along, watching, judging, was more than I could bear. I thought about leaving him a note, but eventually I did nothing; just left, as soundlessly as I could.

It seemed to me that the city was quiet today, much quieter than New York has any right to be; I imagined it, a dead city, its heartbeat stilled forever, the gritty concrete and the shining skyscrapers abandoned, the cars motionless in the street. My feet sloshed in the murky puddles of rainwater. The sky was a clear blue. I clung to the back alleys, even managed to scale a couple of walls, just to see if I could, then dropped back down again, killing time, killing time.

The production schedule Tim had given me, lifetimes ago, was still there in my bag; I'd fished it out back home, studied it, the locations, the times. Not that I was planning anything. It had to be today. And it had to be swift. And it had to be soon.

Took the fire-escape stairs. A long, long haul; my shirt and jeans were soaked through by the time I made it up to the roof. A big building, an expensive building – nowhere but the best for Timothy Hollander.

Slipped through that door, found myself in the open air, in bright blue space, surrounded by green. Neatly trimmed trees in clay pots, bushes, flowers, a riot of flowers, and cast and crew everywhere, running back and forth, styrofoam cups of coffee in chapped hands, fixing lights, tweaking boom mikes. My movieland dream. Lights and cameras and white canvas chairs with the stars' names on the back, all in a garden of roses.

I wrapped my coat around myself, felt Brenda encircle my waist underneath it. I watched through hooded eyes, from under the brim of an ill-fitting hat; and I saw him, chattering away, laughing, giving direction, to two girls. Young. Younger than me. One was pale, brunette, dowdy, or a Hollywood director's idea of dowdy; wire-framed glasses and a gray cardigan. Donna, presumably.

And Bethany.

She looked just like me. Smaller, younger, but just like me. Can't be more than eighteen. Her red hair gleamed, whipped in the wind; she rubbed the goosebumps on her arms with elegant hands. It was an out-of-body experience, watching this girl, the one who could have been me; like watching myself, at a distance, from some alternate dimension, some parallel life.

I stayed there all day, until the sun began to set. I watched them do take after take, ensconced behind a rose bush, unseen, unheard. I heard her recite the lines that should have been mine, the five lines that almost came from my mouth. She flubs them occasionally, probably distracted by the cold, and looks embarrassed. Cute little thing. Innocent little girl.

And then it's done. Cut and print. That's a wrap for today, people. And equipment is packed up, lights are switched off, tarpaulins are drawn over the props and tech stuff they'll need for tomorrow. Everyone troops downstairs, or to the elevator. Tim's the last one left. Last man standing.

I got his attention by smashing out one of the lights – not with Brenda, but with my own balled-up fist. The pain shot down my arm, woke me up a little, though not enough, not enough. He spun around, his eyes enormous, and I knocked him off his feet, to the petal-strewn ground, before he even had a chance to try and run. I held him down with my booted foot, keeping my eyes fixed on him as Brenda lashed around crazily, smashing the lights, tearing up the cameras, wasting all the money he'd raised to commit his dream to celluloid. I studied him, every part of his face, every square inch of skin, and I committed it to memory; I noted the sweat running down his temple, the grains of coke at his nostril, the delicate red veins running through the white of his eyes.

And now here we are. Here I am, really, because I'm alone here. I'm out somewhere in space, floating away from my body; it's Brenda who's doing all the work, Brenda's who's wrapped around his throat. I can feel the bones in the back of his neck through her slim black body, can feel his trembling like a message coming down a telegraph wire. He keeps trying to speak, to plead for his life. I don't want to hear this.

"Oh please. Oh please. Won't tell. Won't tell anyone. You can't, you c-c-can't c-c-c-c –"

"Stop talking!" I snarl. The bones in my head feel as if they're going to collapse, leave my head a caved-in, hollowed-out gourd. Just tighten the tentacle, MJ. Just wait for the snap. It's so easy.

His eyes won't leave me. They'll fall back in his head soon. I just have to wait. Just have to hold on. Stay strong. Stay focused, MJ. Stay focused…

"Please," he croaks, shutting his eyes, tears leaking out from their corners.

I shut my own eyes again, feel the world spin around me, hurtling off its axis. So high up here. My head, my head. I have to do this. I have to do this. I…I…

Brenda goes slack. Draws away from his reddened, chafed throat, curls back around to me, leaves him gasping, clutching his neck.

I stand there a while, watching him, my whole body numb and cold. "Go," I whisper. "Run away."  
He sits there, still gasping for air, looking up at me through terrified, bloodshot eyes.

"RUN AWAY!" I scream, and finally he does. The door clangs shut behind him with a metallic reverb, echoing across the skies.

I sink to my knees, amongst the leaves and petals and broken glass. Blood seeps through the knees of my jeans, but I can't care. I can't even think. Light winks off a copper-colored glass, over on the catering table – somebody's bottle of Southern Comfort, left behind by a crew member.

Brenda shoots out and snatches it off the table.

Getting dark now. The city lights should be coming on soon. But out the attic window, I don't see anything but darkness.

The liquor bottle is on the floor, the last few drops of it soaked into the dust. I should be drunk, but I'm not. I'd feel better if I were drunk. I'd feel nothing if I were drunk. Which is always better.

I was so close. He was such easy prey, and so deserving, such a slimy little maggot, no one would miss him. He squirmed in my grip like the worm he was. Is. And will forever be, now that I spared his life.

It won't change him. He won't magically become a better person because of this. No, he'll be all over the television again, talking about his terrifying ordeal at the hands of Mary Jane Watson. Great publicity for the new film. Hell, he should be paying me.

I can't face Otto. I can't look him in the eye and let him see the weakness in me, the cowardice. I've failed him. I'll lose him. He'll chalk me up, just another failed experiment, failed to live up to his expectations, and he'll throw me away like everyone else did.

I tuck my legs up close to my chest, hug my knees, rest my head on them as I stare out the window. This is the descent. This is the spiral. No way but down from here on in. And I'm clawing, clawing at the sides of nothingness, screaming silently for something real to hang on to, something I can use to slow the downfall.

I'm destabilising. Coming apart. In this beautiful new life that was chosen for me, this new world where I'm an invincible supervillain, held in awe and fear, I'm falling to pieces, or maybe just plain falling. I should be able to be happy now, should have left pain far behind me on the road to God-Knows-Where. But I haven't. It's still here. It still seeps through the cracks, crawls into my brain, whispers in my blood. Every part of me hurts, every single part. And I need someone to hold on to the fragments of me, keep them together. Someone needs to need me. I can't, I can't, I _can't_ do this alone, not any more. There has to be something better. There has to be.

Otherwise, there's nothing at all.

****

Dinner.

We sit at the long wooden dining table, across from each other, eating in silence. Mary Jane merely toys with her food, her eyes trained upon me with the intensity of a panther. I avoid her gaze for the most part, watching my plate as if it is inordinately fascinating, acutely uncomfortable and not knowing why. There's a tremor in the air tonight, a thickness, like the vibrations of oncoming heat lightning; somewhere a storm is brewing.

I know she didn't do it. Couldn't do it. And she knows that I know, and is waiting for me to ask. She will not volunteer anything. She hasn't said a word to me all day, in fact, from the moment I woke up to discover her gone, to the hour I called her downstairs for supper. Just sits, and watches. With those green eyes that scald like boiling water.

Something is brewing this evening, crackling between us, electrifying every casual gesture; I feel it shivering along my tentacles, up my spine, through my nerve-endings: something wicked this way comes.

The clock ticks the minutes away, the loudest sound in the room, the house. After three minutes exactly have ticked past, I dare to glance up, to meet her calm, unnatural gaze. She has given up all pretence of eating now, and sits, motionless, staring back at me, hands placed elegantly upon the tablecloth, either side of her plate. An expression of eerie serenity rests upon her countenance, her eyelids drooping, chin raised. One of her arms, I notice, is lacerated, streams of dried blood that she has not bothered to clean up still marring her perfect skin.

I have to ask. I must know. Ease into it slowly, negotiating with a wild animal. I clear my throat, place my knife and fork carefully down, crossed, upon the plate, look up, and ask: "What happened to your arm?"

Slowly, she casts her eyes down to look at the limb, as if only now realising that it is wounded at all. She looks back up, just as leisurely, her eyes connecting with mine, holding them in an unbreakable lock. "An accident," she says, her voice low, almost a purr. "A mistake."

I want to look away. I want to get away, get up and leave the table, leave her here alone, for the foreboding feeling grows stronger with each passing minute. I don't, and I don't know why. "What kind of a mistake?"

"My kind," she says.

Quiet. I look down at the tablecloth, debate picking up the napkin just to have something to do with my hands.

"Don't look at the table." Her voice grates, harsh and guttural. "Look at me."

I don't, as a rule, respond well to commands. But somehow my own rules are forgotten, cast aside. I look up, meet her ferocious gaze once again.

"Ask me," she says.

I say nothing.

"Ask. Me," she growls.

Behind me, I feel my tentacles writhing, an involuntary movement, a nervous twitch. Yes. The time has come. The words must be spoken. I must ask her.

"Did you do it?" I ask.

But she isn't going to play that game. The look in her eyes tells me that she isn't going to play any kind of game. "Do what?" she asks, but doesn't ask; she won't say until I say.

So, I say. "Did you kill Tim Hollander?"

She sits there, silent, not a word escaping her lips, stiff as a doll, the only living part of her those eyes, those eyes. Then, slowly, her tentacle rises, cranes over her head, an elegant, graceful arch.

And she brings it down on the table.

With an almighty smash, it lands, and sweeps everything, the cutlery, the plates, the glasses, the tablecloth, onto the floor. I watch the china shatter, the glass come apart.

Her body is a slither, a motion unto itself, as she clambers up onto the table, onto her hands and knees, and crawls over to me. I know what's coming. My heart knows what's coming; it is hammering in my chest, beating itself over and over against the prison of my ribcage.

Mary Jane reaches me, after what seems a long moment of frozen time. She entwines her arms around my neck, and she plants on my mouth a bruising, punishing kiss. I can taste her saliva, salty as tears, in my mouth; her tongue pushes past my lips, burrows into the cavern of my own mouth, searching, insistent.

Her kiss sucks the breath from my lungs, the will from my soul. She could be kissing the bleeding surface of my heart, for my skin feels thin, transparent as tissue. Her poison seeps into my blood; all resistance is a pretense; a seismic explosion goes off inside my brain.

I didn't want her touching me before. I think I know why, now.

It has to be this way.

Have to have you. Have to know you're there. I need to feel you – you, because you're here, because you'll do – and know that there's someone clinging on to me, someone I can cling to.

Otto climbs onto the table, kneeling in front of me, not breaking the stranglehold embrace we have on each other. His hands search my body roughly, and I imagine them leaving marks on the skin, plunging inside me, squeezing my internal organs until they pulp. That's what I need. Someone inside. Someone to stave off the blackness.

You'll do, Otto. It's you, because it has to be you. It has to be somebody.

I hold her close to me, feel her breath on the side of my neck; her hair, her shining black hair, raven-black hair. Mary Alice's hair. If I close my eyes, she could _be_ Mary Alice, could be the women I've loved. I won't have to lose them again. All pain and all loss, drowned in her.

I bury my face in that black hair, in my dream of her. Not Mary Jane any more. A dream. My dream of her. You are not the woman you think you are. Be the woman I need you to be. Be the woman I need to need.

His tentacles cage us all around, balancing him as we fall down to the surface of the table, him on top of me. The table is hard and cold, and it hurts my back, but that's all right. One of his tentacles stretches across, turns down the dimmer switch on the light fixture; the world is fading, fading into the edge of darkness. I wind my tentacle around his, and the two of them entwine, mated together like sea serpents. His glasses are crooked on the edge of his nose; I take them off, but he still won't look at me, won't look in my eyes. Oh, God, love me just a little, won't you?

"Mary…" he mutters, kissing the side of my neck, his breath hot and rasping in my ear; I can feel the long strands of his hair, trailing into my mouth, across my tongue.His tentacles snake up my body, start to fumble with my jeans, my T-shirt. We're clasped together in a death-lock, and my mind flashes back to that first night, the night alone on the catwalk, when we rolled over and over each other, punching and clawing and slashing at each other. It's like that now. That's all we're doing, damaging each other in a new way, a way we both seem to need.

I'm rapidly losing my clothing, but not rapidly enough; Otto, losing patience, growls through his heaving breaths, and tears the T-shirt up one side. I shrug it up, over my head, off. Soon now. Soon it will be done. Soon I'll have someone to be closer to.

I don't even think I need _her_, any more. All I know now is that I _need_, period, and that need is all. This skin under my fingertips, under my lips, the white skin of her stomach, is the physical incarnation of that need; desire made flesh. Everything I've lost, all the unhappiness, all the pain, it can all go away if this need is satisfied. It's the need for all that is now gone, and all that I know will one day be just as gone.

It hurts. Oh it hurts. Salve my wounds, lovely woman, whoever you are. Take this hurt away. And then give it to me anew.

Closer. Closer to you.

There are white bedclothes in my mind, pale sheets that I chose myself. And there's a tousled dark head next to mine, a slim body sensed rather than seen close to mine, and brown eyes drinking me in, every part of me. I knew what it meant to be beautiful, then, and not in the way everyone thinks. And because I was beautiful, so was he, so beautiful; his skin, beautiful, eyes, hair, mouth, hands, beauty, the whole definition, the form and the concept, of beauty.

And when I was underneath him, or atop him, and our sweat mingled, and I could feel the heat rising from us, so hot it could saturate the world, melt the tundras, boil the seas and warm the frozen-hearted; that, that was beauty. That was love. All was love. And gone, now. And gone.

Peter.

****

Now. It has to be now. No more waiting. I can't. I can't wait.

I tear my lips away from her shoulder, hold myself above her on straight arms, am on the edge of possessing her, of sating this pain, slaking this thirst.

I stop.

There are tears, streaming down her face, soaking into her hair. Her face is perfectly still, not a muscle moving, nothing to betray a thought or a feeling, carefully composed. Only those tears, coursing down her skin, quiet, unceasing.

The temperature suddenly drops, from boiling point to below zero, and, like ice-water, sanity flash-floods back into my mind. Suddenly I don't know where to look. I don't know what to do. I don't know. I don't know.

I pull myself away from her, off her. She doesn't get up, doesn't move, just lies there, like a broken thing. My tentacles carry me from the table, deposit me beside it, on my feet, on the ground. I brush my hair back from my face, open my mouth; I feel I should say something. Nothing comes out, and nor should it.

With a hand that feels like a piece of raw meat, I reach out, slide my glasses off the table, replace them on the bridge of my nose. I look back at her. Still she hasn't moved. Still she watches the ceiling. Still the tears, always the tears.

Something cracks inside my chest, crumbles, and I don't know why. I shut my eyes, listening to my breathing as it slows, and I turn, and I allow my tentacles to carry me upstairs, carry me away, from her, from what almost, so very nearly, occurred here.

The whole thing began and ended in less than five minutes.

I hear his door slam, upstairs, far away. As soon as it does, I let the noise escape from my throat, the strangled, tortured sound of the animal in pain that I am.

Half-naked, cold, my skin goosebumped, I lie there and I cry, I cry and cry and cry; I roll onto my side, cover my face with my hands, haul myself to my knees there in the middle of dining table, and my whole body heaves with the sobs, heaves until I am dry, retching, coughing and choking.

This pain will not stop. It will not go away. I can cry until there isn't a thing left in me, until I've cried every tear that I would have ever cried in the course of a lifetime. But the pain won't stop. It's here in my heart, like lead in my stomach; I lean over, bend double, clutch my belly, pregnant with pain. I wish I could dissolve, into loose muscle, into blood; all my components, coming apart, leaving nothing on this table but squirming, twitching organs, and dry, crackly skin. I ball my fist up, the fist of the wounded arm, strike the table once, twice, three four five times. Brenda winds herself around me, tries to hold me, give me a comfort that I will never feel.

What is _wrong_ with me? Why, why, why am I _like_ this? Why am I such a _mess?_

Someone has to be responsible for this. Someone made me this way. Once I was good, and pure, and troubled. Once I had no demons. Once I knew how to love. Once I was happy.

It wasn't Peter who stole that from me. I know that much. And it wasn't the fashion people, or my friends, or the media. It wasn't Tim Hollander, it wasn't Alessandra Georgiano, not Chloe Miles, none of them, none of them.

Who, then? God damn it to Hell, who? _Who?_ WHO?

And then I know.

I raise myself up, slow, staring into the dark.

I know.

I know who is responsible.

I know who made me what I am.

****

It didn't happen.

That's what I have decided, after hours of pacing my room, sleepless, restless. My whole body is still shaking, thrown by the suddenness of it, the violence of it.

I was taken by surprise. That's all. She knew which buttons to press, knew my guard was down. All week, life has been off-kilter; this, in a way, was its natural endpoint. She sensed weakness, and, just as I trained her, went for the throat. Went for the heart.

Did I really want her that way? _Do_ I really want her that way? She's a subject, a test subject, my theories made flesh. I've never thought about her in such a manner. I would never have attempted a seduction myself. Life with her isn't like life with Stunner, or even the limited life I had with Mary Alice. I never desired her. I never needed her. I could have taken her in the beginning, if that's what I'd wanted, but…

No. No. It didn't happen, that's all. That's true enough, really; in the end, nothing _did_ happen. She stopped it, stopped it all, with her crying.

Why did she cry? She initiated it. It was all her fault, entirely her fault. She couldn't have been feeling regret, or any misguided loyalty to her husband – that life is behind her now, dead and gone.

Something _I_ did wrong, then. Something _I_ did.

But no, it didn't happen. It doesn't have to change us, change what we have. Ridiculous to let it interfere. I won't let it interfere, not with our plans, my plans. I am Otto Octavius – Doctor Octopus. I've faced worse crises than this and come out a winner.

I can face her.

I _will _face her.

We never have to discuss this. We never have to allude to this. In fact, I've decided that we absolutely _will not_, under any circumstances, bring this up again. Life will go on. And soon enough, we will both forget.

With this in mind, at two o'clock in the morning, I make my slow, measured way down the stairs.

She is sitting, huddled on the window-seat, knees drawn to her chest in that manner of hers I now know so well. It is raining again, always raining, it will never stop raining. The droplets catch the dull light, cast dappled shadows across her luminous face. She has dressed herself again; I catch sight of the tear I made in her T-shirt, and wince.

The silence, all around, like a cloth, studded with the gentle _tap-tap-tap_ of the rain.

"Hi," she says, and I am profoundly, inordinately grateful that she has spoken first.

"Hello," I say back, voice hushed.

"Can't sleep?"  
Numbly, I shake my head, every muscle tensed, on edge.

"Yeah, me neither," she says.

I begin to relax. I should have known she would reach the same conclusion as I; should have known that she would be rational enough to know that this incident does not have to alter anything between us. She is speaking perfectly normally, perfectly calmly. Nothing has changed. Nothing is different. We can go back to the way things were.

"You're…feeling all right?" I ask cautiously.

She dips her head to her shoulder, a sprightly, unaffected movement. "Yeah. 'Course. I'm fine."

She keeps her eyes trained on the night beyond the glass, fixed on the falling rain. Finally, she turns her head to me, her eyes casually heavy-lidded, her expression neutral.

"Hey," she says. "Guess what?

"I'm gonna kill my father." 


	8. Dive

**_Freak Like Me_**

**_By_**

Santanico 

**__**

**_==_**

****

**_Eight: Dive_**

**__**

**_==_**

__

_Now_

There's a pale dawn rising up ahead of me, whiter than sea foam and washing across the sky, drowning the stars. The dark road crunches under the tires of the gleaming black Cadillac, and peels off into the horizon. On either side of me, the endless emptiness of the desert, broken up only by weary-looking cacti, rusted chain-link fences, weather-beaten signposts, the bleached bones of dead things. I've been driving for three days. If I'm at all tired, my body doesn't know it.

        Every nerve, every synapse, is firing at full blast, lighting up my mind like fireworks. This road could be the most fascinating thing I've ever seen; I could watch it go on forever, I really could. Miles and miles of black asphalt monotony, and it's never boring for a moment.

       The reason I like this road so much is because this is the road that's taking me to Tucson, Arizona. And the reason I'm looking forward to getting to Tucson, Arizona – a location I'd never previously felt any desire to visit – is because Tucson, Arizona is where a certain Philip James Watson currently resides.

      Philip James Watson is my father.

And I'm on my way to Tucson, Arizona because that's where I'm going to kill him.

__

**_==_**__

__

_Then_

**"What does it feel like to die?"**

**Midnight. The second floor of the multi-level car park is cold, dark, deserted; the wind, whistling through this concrete hive, scratching against the walls, aimlessly blows loose pieces of trash across the floors like fallen leaves. Flashes of light from the city beyond momentarily illuminate shining chrome, mud-splashed tires, gleaming license plates. And all I can see is her face, in profile, as she walks beside me; all I can hear is her voice, echoing through this lonely space, flat, uninflected, devoid of emotion.**

**      Her question, coming as it does at this time, is not unexpected, though it is one I was hoping to avoid. But anything is better than silence; anything is better than having to look at her, having to remember my weakness. She has sewn up the tear in her shirt with the same rough black thread she used to sew up my wound; every time I catch sight of it, I can't stop myself from thinking that at least our scars are identical now.**

**         I respond, brusquely, as briefly as I can. "It doesn't feel like anything, Mary Jane."**

**     She casts me an unreadable glance, catlike, from the corners of her eyes. So many of her glances, her gestures, her words seem unreadable to me now. "Come on. There must've been pain, at least."**

**       "No. At least, none that I can recall."**

**She bites down on her pale, chapped lips, and the thought snakes into my mind:_ last night, those lips were kissing me._**

**        Forget that. A dangerous memory, the path to a black abyss. But it lies there between us now, buried inside every word, beneath every exchange, few as they have been since the previous night. The memory of what almost happened, that shadowed glimpse of what could have been, heavy in the air like perfume. Nothing is innocent any more; everything is fraught with meaning. **

**       "I bet it was easier," she says quietly.**

**And she, and she. A hardness to her now. That playfulness, that quality that made all her crimes seem no more harmful than a kitten playing with a ball of yarn, has submerged itself beneath something else, an unnatural calm. The calm of the eye of a hurricane; the calm of a battlefield just before the first shot is fired. When I look at her now, I feel an inexplicable sense of loss, as if someone I cared for had moved away overnight without letting me know where they had gone.**

**      "What was easier, Mary Jane?" I ask. I say her name so often now. Soon she will be gone, gone away to do what she has to do, and I will no longer be able to address her by it.**

**      Only temporary. Only for a little while. She is coming back, after all. She _is._**

**"Being dead," she says, so still, so calm. "Sometimes I think _I_ should..." She shakes her head. "I dunno." **

**       I exhale, watch my breath evaporate in a cloud of cold mist, wrap my coat tighter around myself. "You are genuinely determined to do this." I'm not certain if it's a statement or a question.**

**       "He deserves it," she says, her voice harsh, jarring to the ear in its total lack of feeling. "He deserves it and more." She glances across at me. "You agree with me, right? This is the right thing to do."**

**       "This...is the thing you feel you must do," I reply, not really having any idea what that means.**

**    "Things'll be better once I do it," she says decisively, raising her chin, staring off into the distance. "It won't take me too long. I'll feel better once I do it. I'll _work_ better once I do it. Work better with you."**

**       My heart, my traitorous, disobedient heart, lifts at these words.**

**Mary Jane stops short, in front of an enormous black Cadillac; the half-light glimmers across its arching tail-fins, the whiteness of its tires, the leather of its seats. It is polished, buffed and waxed to perfection; its owner must love it dearly. **

**       "Man," murmurs Mary Jane, as she moves to stand beside it, running a hand over its shining surface, stroking it as if it were a pet. She smiles, a pale, wan smile to match her pale, wan face. "Do you remember when we boosted that limo, Otto?"**

**     "The fashion show," I say softly. "Your first job. Our first job together."**

**"That's right," she says, and laughs quietly. "God...so long ago. And, and, do you remember, there was a Cadillac in the parking lot, too, only we didn't take it? It was really pretty, from what I remember...Damn, what color was it?"  **

**     "Blue," I say, and my voice scrapes against the sides of my throat, making it painful to talk. "Pale blue."**

**    "Huh. Yeah. Yeah, that's right." She looks up at me, her eyes narrowed against the dark, the corner of her lip twisted in a small and weary smile. "You really do remember everything, don't you?"**

**       "Some things. The things I want to remember." **

**She watches me, studies me closely, with the detached intensity of someone watching an exhibit behind glass. "_I_ want to remember," she says, her voice quiet. "I want to remember you like this."**

**     Freezing, sour panic enfolds me; my heart seizes up, but I show her nothing of this, keep this irrational terror to myself. "You don't need to remember me," I say, my voice as icy as I can make it, which happens to be quite considerably so. "You are coming back."**

**      "Yeah. Of course I am," she says distractedly, the claws of her tentacle picking the Cadillac's lock. The door comes loose; an alarm begins to squeal, then dies, as the tentacle plunges into the mess of wires beneath the dashboard, small blue sparks flickering in the night. **

**     "Gayle lives upstate," Mary Jane says, no longer looking at me, concentrating on the task at hand. "Shouldn't be too long a drive. After that it's just a matter of finding out where he's occupying space these days, and then...Well." A beat of silence. "And then, it'll just be over, won't it?"**

**      I don't know. Will it? "I hope so," I say, but the register of my voice has fallen so low that I don't think she hears me.**

**     The car's engine roars into life, settles into a deep and steady purr. She leaps over the door, lands squarely in the driver's seat, places her hands on the wheel, looks at me expectantly. "You want me to drop you off home?" she asks.**

**        I seize her by the arms, pull her out of the car, shake her until her teeth rattle, and bellow at the top of my lungs, "You almost made love to me last night! Does that mean _nothing?!_ How can you just _leave_ like this?!"**

**        No. I'm lying. Of course I don't do any of that. Only an idiot, a weak, sentimental idiot, would.**

**      "No," I say. "Don't bother. Unless there's anything you need to take with you?" **

**Mary Jane grins, her dead eyes making it a horrible sight, like the rictus of a skeleton. "Nah." Her tentacle flicks through the air, undulates in a showy fashion, winds around her shoulders. She strokes its metal skin tenderly. "I've got all I need right here."**

**       She backs the car out of the parking space, not sparing me another glance, and peels off down a ramp, her hair whipping around her shoulders like black wildfire, her tentacle draping itself across the white leather of the seats. The trash, whipped into the air in  her wake, dances and whirls before me, and by the time it comes to rest again upon the cold cement floor, she is gone. **

**         And I remain behind, staring after her, at the place where she used to be. It's for the best, of course, the very best. I admire her courage, the fact that she has the bravery to do what I never had the opportunity to; and, unlike the previous nonsense with that film-maker, I have no doubt that she will see this through to the end. And when she does, she will return to me, satisfied, stronger, at peace with herself. It will make her happy.**

**         But even as I convince myself of this, another track of my mind is stuck, like a record in a groove, at a certain point in time. A moment in the past, when she grabbed hold of my hand, and begged me not to leave her alone. **

**        Yes, Mary Jane. It _was_ so long ago.**

**_==_**__

_Detective Garrett shuts the door to his office, sighing, running a hand through his rumpled brown hair as he collapses behind his desk. The second he sits down, a newspaper falls from the sky, landing with a soft smack upon the wooden surface of his desk._

_       "True or false?" asks a voice from on high._

_Garrett knows he ought to be at least slightly fazed by this, but the last few weeks have been so weird, so saturated with endless discussion of the misadventures of a tentacled model and her octopedal boyfriend, that it wouldn't surprise him to look out the window and see that it's raining newspapers all over Manhattan._ __

_       He picks up the paper, scans the headline, reads the story aloud in a tired voice: "'WATSON ATTEMPTS MURDER OF HOLLANDER. Acclaimed film-maker Tim Hollander has been to the NYPD with claims that former model turned terrorist, Mary Jane Watson, made an attempt on his life yesterday morning. 'She was like some wild beast,' Hollander declared in a press conference held at his Manhattan apartment last night. 'I feared for my life. I believe I am only alive today due to my ability to reason with her; artists instinctively know how to communicate with the outlaw element.'" Garrett snorts. "Jesus. Even his soundbites are pretentious."_

_     "So. Is it true?"_

_Garrett looks up to the ceiling, where Spider-Man crouches, watching him through narrowed, anxious white eyes. "From what we gather, yeah. Hollander was here most of yesterday, tiresome little peckerwood that he is, and he did indeed tell us that Watson tried to kill him that morning. I'll tell you something, though, he didn't mention anything to me about his 'ability to reason with her'." Garrett gets up, walks across to the coffee machine, sets it to boil. "Guy was gibbering with terror so damn hard, he could barely reason with _us_. We did find out the details eventually - that she just let him go, no heroics on his part whatsoever. Still, it's nice to know he's recovered enough to turn the whole thing into free publicity."_

_        Spidey drops from the ceiling, a dash of red and blue, and lands on the edge of Garrett's desk. "How can you be sure he's telling the truth, though?" he asks seriously. "Mary J - Watson has never even tried to kill anybody prior to this. I can't believe she'd just change her M.O. like that, for no reason."_

_       "I wouldn't say for _no _reason." Garrett pours steaming black coffee into a Styrofoam cup, turns back around to face the webslinger, leaning back against the table. "I only spent a few hours with Hollander, and by the end of it, _I_ pretty much wanted to kill him, too."  _

_       "You don't sound like you're taking this very seriously," Spidey says, and Garrett_ _detects a hint of hope in the other man's voice._

_       "I wouldn't say that. Though there weren't any witnesses around at the time, a brief medical examination revealed that Hollander does have some pretty nasty marks on his throat. He says she tried to strangle him with that tentacle thing on her back, so that would line up."_

_      "Maybe he did it himself," Spidey says. "To back up his story."_

_Garrett shakes his head. "No dice. The examination showed that they couldn't possibly have_ _been self-inflicted."_

_      "Doc Ock, then, maybe?" Spidey asks, a note of desperation creeping into the voice he swore he would keep neutral, aware that he is beginning to grasp at straws. "He's the only one of the two with a murder rap. Watson, she's never hurt anyone. It would kind of have to be him, wouldn't it?"_

_        "Nope. His tentacles are much thicker than the one that seems to have a hold on Hollander. Besides, why would Hollander lie about that? Octavius has just as much supervillain cachet as Watson does - more, really. So we figure he's probably telling the truth." Garrett shrugs, wondering why he feels he ought to apologise for conveying this information. "Basically, from where I'm standing, it all looks pretty bad for Watson."_

_         "Yeah. You can say that again," mutters Spidey._

_Garrett clears his throat uncomfortably. "Which is why I've been ordered to step up the manhunt. And we've been authorised to bring her in by any means necessary." He coughs, even less at ease. "You know...'dead or alive'."_

_      Spidey looks up sharply, eyes widening. "What?"_

_Garrett shrugs helplessly. "If there's even the slightest chance that Watson could bring herself to murder someone - "_

_      "But she didn't," Spidey is quick to point out. "She let Hollander go. She couldn't kill him. She doesn't have it in her."_

_        Garrett regards him suspiciously. A vague notion, only half-formed, flickers across the surface of his mind, then disperses, dismissed almost automatically. The wall-crawler is only_ _concerned about Watson the way he would be about anyone in this situation. Garrett's just tired, just irritated. Mind's making up fantastical possibilities. Just need some sleep, or, conversely, more coffee._

_       "Yeah, well, maybe you can be sure of that," he resumes the discussion with an irked crick of the neck, "But we don't have that luxury. Watson's committed several major thefts, in league with a guy who's got the deaths of a hell of a lot of people under his belt."_

_      "But she isn't -" Spidey tries, but Garrett, who has reached the end of his tether, cuts him off._

_    "You know something, Spider? I didn't know better, I'd wonder if you weren't defending her because you're in_ _league_ _with her somehow. Maybe I should run_ you _in for some_ _questioning, hahn?"_

_         Under the mask, Spider-Man grits his teeth. Wonderful. The one ally he has on this police force is pissed at him, at a time when he can hardly afford to lose even one iota of the little influence he has. "I'm only trying to do what I think is right, Detective."_

_       "Aren't we all," mutters Garrett, slumping down behind his desk, rubbing his eyes with one hand. "G'wan, get outta here. I've got things to do."_

_       "Ditto," Spidey tosses over his shoulder as he hauls up the window-sash, perches on the sill. "But, Detective?"_

_       Garrett looks up blearily._

_"No offense. But I really hope I can get to her before you do." And he vanishes._

**_==_**

Sunrise now, and I drove all night to get here.

A chill in the early morning air; I wrap my coat around my body, press Brenda closer against my spine. I lean back against the car, parked across the street from the vast black silhouette that is my sister's house. The sunlight is wan, hazy, giving me the odd impression that I'm looking at the watery reflection of the world rather than the world itself. Nothing feels quite real; nothing that I see strikes me as anything deeper than a mirage. I guess that'll change soon enough.

     It's a nice little street, a tidy little street. Not like the place where Otto and I live. Here the lawns are neatly mowed, small clean squares of emerald green, glistening and frosted with icy dewdrops. Moisture drips down the white-painted walls, glimmers on the soccer-mom cars parked all in a nice little row out front. Kids' bikes, expensive-looking, new, rest on their sides near gracefully sloping driveways. Somewhere, a dog barks. Smoke peels from a chimney. I breathe in, the smell of fresh-cut grass and barbecue charcoal and clean, unpolluted air filling up my clear and empty mind. Only the crunch of gravel under my feet lets me know that I have started the journey, up Gayle's walkway, towards her front door.

       I ring the bell before I have time to pause, to think about this, to rehearse what I'm going to say. I can't slow down now. I can't afford to. There's darkness gathering at my back, hellhounds on my trail.

      No answer. She must be sleeping, tucked up safe and warm in her nice big bed in her nice big house in a nice, nice street. I press down on the doorbell again, listen to the tinny, high-pitched chimes; I press down again, more chimes, again, chimes, again and again and again.

     "All right! All right! Hang on!" I hear that voice, that grating, nasal voice, filtering through the thick frosted glass. "Jesus," she mutters, and I see a shape, crimson and black and creamy-white, drawing closer to the door. Metallic clicks and rattles, a bolt being pushed back, the squeak of the hinges as the door opens, and there she stands. Gayle. Big sister Gayle. Worn red bathrobe knotted at the waist, just barely clinging on to her skinny, hipless figure; her short dark hair, going prematurely gray, tousled and tangled; her pinched, pale face, long and equine, as the sleepiness drains away from it and her mean little dark eyes grow large, larger, huge.

       "Heya, Gaylie," I grin, and Brenda snaps through the air by way of emphasis.

Gayle can't seem to find any words. She's _that_ overjoyed to see me again. So overjoyed she can't even bring herself to smile, or move, or do anything other than grip the edge of the door with taut, whitening knuckles.

      "Don't I get a hello?" I enquire.

Gayle opens her mouth, shuts it, opens it again. "You..." Her voice is hoarse; she clears her throat, shuts her eyes tight, as if I'll be gone once she opens them. "What - are you - doing here?" she finally manages to strangle out, as if every word is a razor blade in her esophagus.

       "Well, you know, Gayle, it's just been _so long_ since I last visited!" I gush, stepping past her rigid form and sauntering into her living room. Sunlight splashes across teakwood furnishing, overstuffed couches, floral prints and Renoir reproductions on the walls. "I mean, we're family, right?" I continue conversationally, collapsing into a velvet recliner, throwing one leg over the arm. "Family members ought to see each other so much more often than you and I do. And you have such a _glorious_ house! Divorce settlement paid off better than expected, am I right?"

        Fury ignites in Gayle's eyes, that familiar mixture of disapproval and defensiveness she employed around me so often in the past, but before she can reply, I cut her off. You don't get to have your say here, Gayle. You don't get to have an opinion.

        "Aw, I'm just yanking your chain, sis. Seriously, you have such a good thing going here." My voice drops into dreaminess, into reverie, and I can't tell which part of it I'm faking and which part I'm not. "You've got the pretty house, and the pretty children, and the pretty, safe, ordinary life. Whereas, me? Well, you know." I chuckle, a low and filthy sound, slithering up from somewhere deep inside me to bubble to the surface. "Not so much."

       Gayle, never taking her eyes off me, as if I were a wild animal (not wrong there, Gaylie girl), slowly sits down on the couch opposite me. "Why are you here?" she asks carefully.

      Short, direct, and to-the-point. That's my sister. "Well, I've been thinking a lot lately," I say, tossing my head back, leaning into the recliner, putting my feet up. "About family. Our family. It's not a great one, is it, really, Gayle?" I lean my head on the back of the seat, gazing languidly across at her. "All families have their problems. I'll give you that. But our family. _Our_ family..." I trail off. Things are starting to cloud over, inside my brain; that feeling of unreality again, that notion that I am not really here. "Christ, Gayle," my voice says, faint, independent of me, working from somewhere far off beyond the horizon, "Christ. Doesn't it make you angry? Don't you feel anything about it any more? Don't tell me you really believe the past is dead and gone. Don't tell me you really think any wounds can heal. Because they don't. They just get infected. Turn to poison..."

       "Just tell me what you want and leave my house," Gayle blurts out, and the sharp, shrill note in her voice snaps me back to what is probably best thought of as reality.

      "I'll leave when I'm damn well ready to leave," I say quietly, sinking deeper into the chair, steepling my fingers. Brenda, balancing herself on her claws, scuttles across the top of the chair, crouching on the edge, as if ready to spring. "But have no fear. I'm in a hurry. I don't think I have much time left in which to do this. So I'll make this brief. Dad."

       Gayle reacts; she immediately knows, she has to know, what I mean by this, but she has to ask anyway. "Dad? I don't -"

     "Where is he?"

Gayle is silent.

"I know you know," I add. "Know you call him, talk to him, probably see him. Got his address in your little black book, Gayle? Got him on the speed-dial, maybe? Hell, maybe you've seen him so often you've got them committed to memory. I guess you're a forgiving type, Gayle. That's a good thing to be. I suppose. Because I really wouldn't know."

        "Get out," Gayle says, softly, her voice trembling. "Get _out_."

"Where's Dad?"

"I'll call the police."

"Where's Dad?"

"I swear to _GOD_, Mary Jane!" she screams, slamming a fist into the depths of the couch with a muffled thump, leaping to her feet. "Get the hell out of my house _right now_, or I'll -"

     "Sit down and shut up," I say, ice crystallising my voice, as Brenda whirls out, plants herself squarely on the middle of Gayle's chest, and shoves her so hard she collapses back down into her seat. "You don't get to give orders. You don't even get to make requests. You get to answer my question, and then you get to live. So. Where. Is. Dad?"

       She hunches her arms and legs close together, stiff and unyielding, allowing me not even the slightest bit of eye contact. "I'll never tell," she mutters, shaking her head. "I'll never tell _you_."

      I smile, ruefully, feeling it only as a stretch of my lips. "You never did like me much, did you?"

     Gayle looks up, through hooded eyes, from beneath a snarl of dark brown hair. "I won't let you hurt him," she growls. "I know what you're thinking, Mary Jane, I know what you want to do, I know what you've become, and I just _won't_ let you do it."

      "Nobody has to _let_ me do anything any more," I say calmly. "You spend your whole life waiting for permission, you just spend your whole life waiting."

      "That doesn't even _mean_ anything!" Gayle hisses, trembling with rage, her eyes dark slashes of hatred, set deep in her corpse-pale face. "You think you're so entitled, so justified in everything you do, just because you got hurt. Well, I got hurt, too, Mary Jane. News flash - everyone does. You're not special, and you sure as hell don't have the right to decide who gets punished and how."

       "You're right, Gayle. You're absolutely right," I reply, and I'm really quite astonished at the way I seem to be maintaining this sense of unflappability, this sense of total control. "I should forgive and forget, right? Let bygones be bygones. Shove all my memories down deep into some dark place I'll never visit, because what's the use in dwelling on the past?"

       I lean forward; I can feel the black dogs of Hell coming up close behind me now, their venomous breath warming the back of my neck. "The world's coming to an end, Gayle," I say quietly. "Time's going backward. Everything old is new again. The dead past is rising, bubbling to the surface. I held it down inside me for as long as I could. But I can't any more. It's broken its bonds, it's roaming free inside my brain. I've been in pain like you wouldn't believe, so much pain it paralysed me, made me forget that there was anything in the world _other_ than pain. And you know why I'm this way? Because of _him_." My voice is a striking snake, sharp of fang, filled with poison. "It's all his fault. Everything I am. Everything I never wanted to be. Maybe _you_ can forgive him, Gayle. You didn't turn into _this._ But if I'm ever gonna find any quiet and peace and grace in this life, I've got to find him, and I've got to kill him."

      Gayle sits there on the couch, a thousand miles away from me, her mouth open and her eyes moist. "You're insane," she says softly. "I don't know if it's being with Doctor Octopus, or if you've always been this way, or what, but you are _insane_."

      I've had enough. I tried to explain to her, even though I didn't have to. Tried to make her see my reasoning, tried to make her see how necessary this is. She suffered because of him, too. I don't know why she's resisting this, don't know why she doesn't want to help me. Doesn't matter. She's going to anyway.

        I stand; Brenda slithers through the air, across the room, stopping only inches away from Gayle's face; I am satisfied to see her jump when the claws open, as they undulate, unbearably close to Gayle's eyes. "You and I have never really gotten along, have we, Gayle?" I say. "Never really saw things the same way. But you're gonna help me out here. Just this once. Where is he?"

       Gayle swallows; the tears in her eyes spill over, tremble on her colorless cheeks as her body shakes and shudders. "I can't tell you, MJ."

      I'm doing the right thing. I know I'm doing the right thing. Everyone who gets what I have coming to them, deserves it. Gayle deserves it. Brenda presses closer, closer, so close that if Gayle blinks, her eyelashes will brush the edge of Brenda's claw. "Where is he?"

       Gayle's breath is coming in short, sharp gasps, brief rushes of air entering and escaping her throat. "You'll have to kill me," she whispers. "I won't tell you. You'll just have to kill me."

     I want to tear this house apart, scream at the top of my lungs. _He's not worth it!_ I want to shriek at her, into her tear-stained face. _He's not worth your life or anyone else's! Don't you remember how he treated you? How he treated Mom? All of us?_

        Instead, I grit my teeth. I steel myself, resolve myself, retreat into myself even further. I'm going to have to play the card I swore would be only a last resort, make the threat that no one will ever forgive me for.

      "Gayle," I say, my eyes fixated on some point far away in the distance, "Which one of your sons would you say you're more attached to?"

       Gayle pulls back, snaps her head up to look at me. Her expression is raw, naked, a self-explanatory definition of terror. "Oh my God," she whispers. "You wouldn't. You wouldn't. No."

      "Where's Dad?"

"Leave them out of it, please. Even you couldn't be so -"

I can't stand this any more. I want to get out of this house, out of this street, away from her, off to someplace else, anywhere else. I just want to get this all over with, go home, go back to Otto, the only person in the world I'll believe when he reassures me that I've done well. But I can't do any of that until I'm finished here. I can't do any of that until Gayle lets me go.

     "Where's Dad?" I ask again, the words automatic.

Gayle lowers her eyes, shivering, and I know then that I've won. "He's in Arizona," she mutters. "Tucson, Arizona. In..." She wipes her eyes with her fingertips. "In a nursing home, the Toussaint Nursing Home. There. Are you happy now?"

       I guess I should be. I should be happy. I've got a destination now, someplace to focus on, someplace to go. But all I feel is cold.

       "Thanks," I say shortly, turn on my heel, and stride towards the door. Gayle is still sitting, huddled on the couch, shaking uncontrollably, every muscle locked into a spasm. "You're a monster," she whispers.

      "Yeah," I throw back over my shoulder. "I get that a lot."

"You're a monster," she goes on, raising her voice, cold and hard, "And it's got _nothing_ to do with the way you look."

       That stops me. I don't really know why, but it stops me, right there in the doorway. I think, once, maybe, I would've been able to figure out what it was about that statement that bothered me, that made me stand so still, but now it just sinks into the quicksand of my mind, along with everything else. I shrug, raise my head, and leave, slamming the door behind me, slamming the door on her and whatever it was that she meant by that.

        I wouldn't really have hurt Tommy or Kevin. Of course. I'm not like that. I know I'm not. I'm sure I'm not. But Gayle thinks I am, and I wonder, if I wasn't hurting so much already, whether or not that would hurt me even more.

      Well, it doesn't matter. I'll put it out of my mind, file it away somewhere, the same place I filed away what happened last night with Otto, the same place I file away anything and everything that might trip me up if I think about it, might grab me in a stranglehold and force me to my knees. It's over now. It's no longer important.

      What is important is that I got what I needed. I know where I'm going.

Tucson, Arizona.

**_==_**

**It's the silence that hurts the most.**

**Seeping in through every crack in the floorboards, every splinter in the windowpanes; enveloping the furniture, even seizing hold of the clock, choking in the throat of Time itself, forcing it to crawl upon its knees.**

**         This house has died since she left. Or, if not actually dead, it hibernates, lies unconscious until her return. Her presence here was the kiss of life; without her, nothing living walks these floors - only ghosts, among them my own. There is not a thing here, no single thing, that is untainted by some memory - snatches of song here, and the swish of a skirt there, and my father's laughter over here, and screams and bellows over there. My life story is written upon the faded wallpaper of this house, in ink that only I can see.**

**         I could leave, I suppose. I tell myself this, often, as I sit on the couch, or walk aimlessly from room to room, or make myself endless cups of tea to pass the time of my solitary vigil. I could leave whenever I want. I'm not bound to this place. I'm not bound to her.**

**         But there's always a chance. Always a chance that the phone will ring, seconds after I have stepped out the door; always a chance that the sound of a black Cadillac's wheels, crunching upon gravel, will whisper outside the window of a house I have abandoned only an hour before. I am trapped here, as surely and securely as if I had been chained. I must wait. I must exercise all my reserves of patience, and I must wait.**

**        I have this feeling, you see. This strange and indefinable feeling – an instinct, a premonition, I know not what. Call it what you will, but I am possessed by the almost physical sensation, vertiginous and nagging, that something dreadful is going to happen. **

**        Of course, one might argue that something dreadful has already happened. The dining room table…I can't even bring myself to look at it any more. That table, where my mother served my father and me our meals every night throughout my childhood, now only recalls the shame that was us, a mass of silver and black tentacles, writhing on the polished surface in the world's least successful attempt at sexual congress. The image comes to me as if I had been only an observer of the incident; the image of her, delicate and small, and me, clumsy and oversized, and both of us equally desperate. The recollection makes me shudder. The very thought of it, of what we almost did with each other, rutting like animals, makes me sick, disgusts me. To think of how easily I allowed myself to descend into that bestial state, how close I came to losing all control. But none of that does a thing to stop the unwanted, treacherous throb of arousal that runs through me whenever I think of it. **

**          So I shouldn't want her to come back, I suppose. She weakens me, dilutes me. I would be better off without her. Much better off.**

**          I wonder if it is my fault she's gone. What I almost did with her, what I didn't do.   **

**      No. No, this line of thinking produces nothing. The whole question is irrelevant. She is coming home, after all. Soon, very soon. And everything will be the way it was before. Improved, perhaps. More efficient. More professional. We will work better together than ever before.**

**       It's starting to rain again; the sound of the droplets, scattered at first, then steadily increasing, solidifying into a repetitive rhythm, fails to even make a dent in the wall of silence that surrounds the house. **

**        I am just about resolved to make my exit from this place when, as if controlled by my own mind, the telephone gives off a great peal of sound. One of my tentacles shoots out, snatches the receiver off the cradle before the first ring has even been completed.**

**        "Hi." Her voice, coiling into my ear like a ribbon of smoke. "It's me."**

**"Of course it is," I say with what I deem appropriate coldness, leaning forward on my seat. "Who else would it be?"**

**        "Grabbed it on the first ring. That's pretty impressive." A trace of amusement, of mockery. It irritates my temperament even further. "You haven't been sitting by the phone this whole time, have you?"**

**       "Don't be ridiculous," I snap.**

**"That's not exactly a 'no', is it?"**

**"Where are you?" I ask, having no desire to pursue this subject any further.**

**"Gas station. Pulled over to fill up, they let me use the phone here." A clattering in the background. "And I'm, uh. I'm not exactly in New York any more."**

**         I sit up, my back ramrod straight. A pulse in my throat begins to beat. "What do you mean?"**

**      "Well, I went to see Gayle, like I said, and she told me where he is. He's in Tucson."**

**        "Tucson?" My head is starting to hurt.**

**"Arizona. So that's where I'm going, right now. I just thought I should let you know."**

**"How very considerate," I reply frostily.**

**"Don't be like that, Otto. Look, I've gotta go. I'll be back in about three days' time, okay? Take care."**

**        "But you _are _coming back?" I ask, before I can stop myself.**

**But the line is dead.**

**_==_**

 The sun beats down on my neck and shoulders as I replace the phone in its cradle, absently fiddle with the coin slot in the hope of some change. I think I heard rain in the background over there. Doesn't surprise me. It's always raining somewhere.

       Otto sounded kind of weird. He thinks about things too much, that's his problem. If you don't think about anything, nothing can touch you. I've shut off the part of my brain that's responsible for connecting feelings to memories; even if I hadn't, I'm pretty sure it would've shut down by now anyway.

        I shade my eyes with one hand, look out past the tin roof of the gas station, past the makeshift wooden sign advertising cheap petrol. Beyond my own shadow is nothing but flatland, dry and dusty, shading into sand as it nears the horizon, as the road winds on and on. My eyes are stinging, heavy as sandbags, but I've got to keep going. I can sleep any other time. I've got to keep my eyes open, got to move on and on until I finally get where I need to be.

         The gas station attendant approaches, a grubby kid about nineteen, sand in his shaggy brown hair, acne scars on his cheeks, plaid shirt, oil-stained jeans. "She's all full up, Ma'am," he tells me. "And then some. That'll be twenty dollars."

         I hand him the cash, saunter back across to the car, the sand gritty beneath my boots. The kid looks at the Caddy with naked admiration. "That's some sweet ride you got there," he says with a shy grin.

           "Thanks," I say carelessly, slamming the door and gunning the engine. "Maybe on my way back, I'll let you keep it."

         The kid's eyebrows shoot up his forehead; before he can reply, I've lost him in a cloud of dust.

**_==_**

_Garrett is on his fifth cup of coffee for the day, and doesn't foresee his caffeine intake going down any time soon. His fingers drum on the edge of his desk as he inhales the thick black scent of the beans, bathes his face in the steam; his coffee breaks are about the only opportunity for a little peace and quiet he's had in the course of the last few months._

_        So, of course, it just stands to reason that this one doesn't last very long._

_There's a commotion outside his office; sounds of a scuffle, a woman yelling, "Let me through, for Christ's sake! I have to see him! I have to see someone!"_

_          Garrett sighs, downs the coffee, stands, opens the blinds that shield his office, peers out into the chaos of the department._

_         The woman is tall, thin, wrapped in a gray overcoat, looks like she got dressed in either a hurry or the dark; no make-up on her thin, drawn face, and her eyes, shadowed by a tangle of dark hair, are wild, frenzied with fear. Three uniformed officers are trying their hardest to restrain her, to calm her; their efforts yield nothing but a fresh barrage of loud protests._

_       "Get off of me – get _off_ me!" she snarls, yanking her arm away from one of the befuddled officers. "Don't any of you goddamn people understand?! I'm Gayle Watson, I'm Mary Jane Watson's sister, I have to talk to somebody, it's_ urgent _–"_

_        The sister. Okay. This is definitely worth investigating._

Garrett puts down the cup, opens the door and shoves his way through the crush of bodies towards the distraught woman. "Ms. Watson? I'm Detective Neil Garrett…"

      "Oh, thank God!" Gayle breathes, one trembling hand pressed to her chest, eyes closing under the weight of her relief. "Are you the man in charge of finding my sister?"

_      "One of them, yes." Garrett motions to the officers, who fall away and leave them alone. "Would you like to step into my office?"_

_          Once the door is closed, Gayle collapses into the chair in front of Garrett's desk, breathing out harshly, kneading her forehead with her fingers. Closer to her now, Garrett notices the sharp lines of her face, the black smudges underneath her eyes. She looks older, much older, than she is._

_         "Something to drink, Ms. Watson?" he offers solicitously. "Tea, coffee - ?"_

_She waves the offer away irritably. "No, no. There isn't time. I – I tried to call, as soon as she left –" She's almost babbling now, almost insensate with fear " – I tried to ring you people, but nobody would talk to me, they just kept putting me on hold and transferring me, putting me on hold, transferring me, over and over again, so eventually I just said 'screw it' and decided to come –"_

_            "Ms. Watson," Garrett tries, leaning across the desk, palms pressed together in supplication, "I realise this is difficult, but please, try and calm yourself. I gather this is about your sister, but I don't know what you're saying here. Have you had some kind of contact with her?"_

_            Gayle laughs hysterically. "Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Contact. If by 'contact' you mean that she showed up on my doorstep this morning and threatened me until I had to – Oh, God, I just shouldn't have told her, but my kids, she threatened my _kids_ –"_

_  "Told her what, Ms. Watson?" Garrett has gotten the gist of it by now, and is leaning forward on the edge of his seat, every nerve acute, a muscle in his jaw growing tighter by the minute. "What did she want to know?"_

_            Gayle shudders, knots her pale, bony hands together in her lap. "Where our father is," she whispers. "Our father. In a nursing home, a goddamn nursing home, in Tucson. She said she was going to – oh, my God, she's crazy, you should have seen her –"_

_            "Going to what?" _

"Kill him!"_ rasps Gayle, snapping her head up to stare blankly into Garrett's eyes. "She's going to kill him! He abandoned us when we were children, he drank and he beat up our mother and he hit me sometimes, and now she's going to _find him_ and _kill him!"__

             Garrett sits back in his chair, feels the rush of air escaping his lungs. "That's what she said?"

_    "That's what she said and that's what she'll do. You didn't see her face, you didn't see her eyes. She's so lost, she's so completely lost inside herself, and I…" Gayle shakes her head. "I don't know. I don't even know if she _can _be stopped. But you have to. You have to try, at least. Our dad, he's an old man now, he can't defend himself…"_

            Garrett gets up, awkwardly pats her on the back. "Try not to worry, Ms. Watson…" he begins, painfully aware of how hopelessly inadequate those words really are. Apparently also in recognition of this, Gayle snorts derisively. Garrett moves on.

_          "We'll alert the US Marshalls, as well as the Tucson PD, and they'll head her off as she arrives. Who knows, we may even catch her before she reaches Arizona at all."_

_    Gayle sniffs loudly. "Will you – will you be moving my father to a safe house, or - ?"_

_   "I…" Best just to be honest with her. "No, Ms. Watson. I think it would be best if we kept him where he is, under heavy police protection, of course. This may be the best chance we have of taking Mary Jane down, and if she discovers your father is no longer there – "_

_    "Are you saying that you're going to use my father as bait?" Gayle's voice, stabilised, has acquired an iciness, the rigid quality of a shield, something that encloses and protects her. _

_      Garrett sighs, leans his forehead on the palm of his hand as he sits back down. "That's a pretty unappealing way of putting it, Ms. Watson."_

_     "But it's the truth. Yes?" An edge to her now, sharp, finely honed. Briefly, Garrett wonders if this is how she survived life with the man she now seeks to protect, if this is how both sisters survived. _

_          "Yes, Ms. Watson. I suppose it is. But it's the only way, and you must believe me when I assure you that your father will not be placed in any danger –"_

_         "My father already is in danger." Gayle shuts her eyes, shuts them against this world, against this truth, and then, without warning, slams her fist down hard upon the top of the desk. "MJ, damn you!  Damn you to hell, you psychotic _bitch!_" she grinds out through clenched teeth, no longer aware of the detective's presence. "How did you _come_ to this? How did _everything_ come to this?! I don't…It…" She bites the sentence off, sits, stiff and silent, her trembling fist still resting on the tabletop._

_           Garrett is quiet, unwilling to intrude on the woman's naked grief. It is a great relief to him when she is the one to speak again. _

_     "Just…When you send them out after her. Just, please, don't hurt her. She's sick. She's very sick. She's my sister." The tears begin to roll down her pallid face, to drip off the end of her pointed chin. "Please?"_

_           Garrett says nothing. Then:_

_"We will do whatever we have to do, Ms. Watson."_

_Gayle emits an indefinable sound, a moan, a smothered wail, heavy and thick with pain. She hunches over, wraps her arms across her stomach, bows her head so low her hair almost brushes her knees, and gives way to the sobs that wrack her spindly body. Garrett stands, walks across, and kneels by her side, stroking her bowed back, for what seems a very long time._

**_==_**

The engine cools in the night air, as tumbleweeds dance over the darkened horizon, rolling past the car parked by the side of the road. Steam rises gently from the tarmac, curling past the dry and dust-coated plant life, the black shapes of cacti whose outstretched limbs cast shadows, almost human, across the unmoving sands. A warm breeze, the last remnants of the hot desert day, blows across my still form as I lie in the back seat of the Caddy, arms tucked behind my head, watching the stars. So many more of them out here, away from the city lights and the smog; so strange to think that every single one of them is actually dead by the time its light arrives in our world. Beautiful, sparkling things that no longer exist, ghosts moving across the sky.

          Even though there's more of them out here, some of them are the same no matter where you are. I can make out Orion, the Big Dipper, Sirius, Betelgeuse. The same stars that whirled over Otto's rooftop, over our heads, as we sat together on the cold slate, only nights ago. When I think of that night, I can't imagine myself actually participating in it; I picture Otto and someone who looks like me sitting next to each other, carefully not touching, the one who looks like me babbling something about her husband or her baby. It's another skin I've shed, another life I've managed to cast off. I wonder if Otto will even recognise me when I come back.

          Otto. Why did you pick _me_, Otto? Back when this all began, back when we lived in our own small worlds, compartmentalised away from each other. Why was it me, and not some other pretty girl, some other flirtatious, winking catwalk honey stalking down the runway? Did I send out some kind of frequency that only you could hear? Was everything I kept inside, hidden even from myself, written upon my face in a language only you could read? And why is it that, after you changed me, after you gave me a whole new self to try and understand, you became so afraid of me, shied away from me every time I tried to get close to you?

          That night on the table. The last night of my second life, before I entered this one, the third and final one. I haven't let myself think of it until this moment; even now, I don't know what I feel when I do. I can't decide if I wish it hadn't happened or if I wish I'd seen it through to the end. If it hadn't happened, we'd have gone on exactly as we were, a constant repetition of highs and lows. If I'd seen it through, well, I guess we'd be lovers, or something, and what that would mean I can't even begin to fathom. Idly, I slide a hand up under the thin cloth of my T-shirt, cup my right breast, try to remember what it felt like when Otto was the one doing that; impossible to recapture the exact sensation, just as it's impossible to imagine it ever going any further.

Well. Either way. If things had gone any differently, I know I wouldn't be here now. I'm not sure if that would be good or bad.

       Although, I haven't wanted a drink since I set out. That has to be good. A sign that I'm getting better. Maybe it's possible to get so sick that you eventually come out the other side and are well again; stoke the fire until the fever finally breaks. I'm doing exactly what I should be doing. What I should've done right from the start.

       Father. Dad. Daddy. Feel me, you old son of a bitch. Feel me coming for you. Feel the ground shake under your feet, feel the earth vibrating as I speed in your direction. Feel the heat of the fever that burns me from the inside, and know that the daughter you lost, the daughter you rejected, the stupid little bimbo you wasted your money and time on, who said and did nothing as you heaped misery upon the woman who bore her – know that she's heading straight for you, and know that, soon enough, even the stars in the sky won't be nearly as dead as you are.

       No more thinking. No more contemplation. Thought may arrive at lightning speed, but damned if it doesn't slow you down. And I've got to be fast. Fast and quick, clean and empty as the desert wind.

         In one motion, I sit up, leap over the back of the front seat, flop down in front of the wheel, and gun the engine. It briefly occurs to me that I might've taken the last half-hour or so to get some sleep, but it's too late for that now. Oh, well. Doesn't matter.

     No regrets, huh?

**_==_**

**Interesting, how the days and nights all blend together when no longer divided by sleep.**

       I tried, I truly did. I lay awake on the cold and uncomfortable couch, watching the reflections of the raindrops on the ceiling, listening to the growl of thunder outside. I wondered if it was raining where she is, if she was asleep someplace, warm and dry. No; she'd be in the desert by now, speeding through the night, every bit as sleepless as I. The whole world, I feel certain, is unconscious except for us.

**        Just because the days blend together doesn't mean they are any easier to bear; I find it very hard to believe that she has only been gone for two. My fingernails are stubby, bleeding, bitten to the quick; a nervous tic left over from childhood, one I resumed without even realising I did so. My past lives are catching up with me, I feel sure of it; the longer I am in this house alone, the longer I feel the phantoms of my own dead personae rising up out of the woodwork to possess me, to fill me once again with old doubts, fears, night terrors. I hear them whispering behind the wainscoting, skittering under the floorboards, giggling inside my brain. The monsters you knew were under the bed when you were a child are still there, still there, and if you're not careful, even now, they will devour you whole.**

**           I throw aside the covers, sit up, sliding a hand through my tangled hair. I glance over at the grandfather clock, peer through the gloom to read the numbers: twelve-fifteen. If Mary Jane were here, we would go out, fill up the lonely hours until dawn with the thrill of our shared work, the exhilaration that lifts the soul when two minds are united in one single pursuit. We'll do that when she comes home. Something simple, something easy – an uptown boutique, maybe, or a jewellery store. Something I know she would enjoy.**

**        She made a list, at one point. A list of places she felt we ought to descend upon, places worthy of her fury. I remember her, sitting on this couch, where I am sitting now, one leg casually thrown over the other, shining dark head bowed over a yellowing notepad, scribbling away furiously with a black felt-tip. So absorbed was she in this exercise, she never noticed that I was watching her from the kitchen. I didn't watch her for that long, anyway. Long enough.**

**        Yes. There's something to occupy myself. I'll find that list. She misplaced it somewhere, didn't seem too concerned about it at the time, but if I find it, that will help us to make our plans when she gets back. It never hurts to be organised, to prepare in advance for eventualities. We are, after all, still professionals. **

**        I get up, allow my tentacles to carry me up the stairs; in my parents' room, I ransack the drawers, pulling them out, sifting through perfumed papers, random objects, the assorted clutter of a life in stasis. The list isn't here. Most likely, she threw it away; but I keep searching nevertheless. I pull out one drawer, plunge the claws one tentacle inside, rummage around; one of the objects in the back of this drawer, long neglected, is a crumpled cigarette packet, one cigarette remaining. I surrendered the habit almost five years ago, but now, gazing upon this relic of the past, the craving returns, exacerbated by my jangled nerves; one of my tentacles, without even requiring a mental cue from me, snatches up a matchbook, strikes a light, sets it to the end of the cigarette, places it between my lips. It is a relief, to be able to occupy my hands, occupy my mind, with something, even if it is only a release of chemicals inside my brain; yet nicotine is a poor substitute for the narcotic that is her presence.**

**          I sit on the edge of the bed, allowing the cancerous vapor to wreathe my head and shoulders, the scent of tobacco thick in the air; every so often I pluck it from the corner of my mouth, hold it in my hands, watch it burn away. Perhaps it is simply the smoke, making me dizzy, but my hands seem to shake, as if I am viewing them under water.**

**       I know what this is. This nameless, ceaseless desire for that which I know not to be good for me. These are the symptoms of withdrawal. Unconsciously, my left hand slides beneath the leather of my overcoat, runs its fingers, delicately, as if over the keys of a piano, across the scar on my side. I shiver at the delicate whisper of pain, more a ghostly sense memory than a physical reality; the fingers of my other hand travel up, brush across the other scar, the one on my face, the one her tentacle left me with, a million years ago. Mary Jane, I wonder, how many more scars will I eventually accrue because of you?**

**         I shake my head, throw the cigarette down, grind it deep into the carpet. This is all for the best, I know. Mary Jane needs to do this, and it is only right that she do this. Fathers…Ah, the damage they do. The pain that they deal out, the pain that they deserve. Brutish creatures, as unwilling to understand what it is to love as they are unable to give it. I'm certain, from the minor clues and allusions that she has made, that Philip Watson was not far removed at all from Torbert Octavius; certain that the former, like the latter, had not the faintest idea what to do with this child that was so far beyond him. A callous monster, crushing his delicate daughter like a butterfly caught under a booted foot; breaking her spirit down, beating her soul into the ground, until she could only conceive of herself as unworthy and wretched, worthwhile only as an object of beauty, manufactured and ornamental as a piece of spun glass. No surprise, then, that she shattered so easily; no surprise that her edges, having broken, are now so razor-sharp. And he will feel those edges, feel them as his bastard throat is slit.**

**    Yes, he deserves it. No matter how old he must be now, no matter what his situation. He hurt her, damaged her beyond repair. And she deserves her vengeance. To murder one's father is no crime, no crime at all, when he does not even deserve to called by that name; one's soul cannot be destroyed by the elimination of someone who had no soul to begin with. **

**      So I have nothing, nothing at all, to be concerned about. Nothing to feel bad about. Everything is going exactly as it ought to. All I have to do is wait. Wait just a little while longer. **

**        Outside, the rain has stopped. The night air breathes into this room, cold and silent; I cannot suppress a shiver. I can't even make out the sound of the clock any more; all sound has left this house, this house that once held voices that sang and laughed and cried and shouted, and spoke to me, told me things, in the dead of night. There was a time, so many years ago, that I prayed for silence to descend upon this house, a silence that would cut off my father's rantings, quell my mother's sobbings, and leave me to myself. Now, I don't know what I wouldn't give to hear the voice of life inside these walls again.**

**         Perhaps she left the list up in the attic. I know she had a fondness for that place. A refuge for her, just as it once was for me.**

**          I enter the half-lit hallway, extend a tentacle, pull down on the frayed cord, allowing the rickety wooden staircase to descend; soundlessly, I slip up to the attic room, too exhausted to make much of an effort, letting my tentacles do all the work.  **

**        Nothing seems to have been rearranged since last I was up here; the dust has re-gathered, the hush re-settled. I can remember only dimly the rage I felt when I found her up here, and cannot bring myself to summon it again at the recollection. She is a part of this place now, part of the fabric of memories that lie draped across every surface. **

**       The albums are carefully stacked, one upon the other, on top of one of the crates; I don't remember doing that, so Mary Jane must have, in some sort of belated effort to appease me. I saunter across, pick up the one on top, the one she was playing when I found her. My fingers leave bare track-marks in the patina of dust that coats it; I lightly blow the rest away. Julie London. A half-smile quirks the corner of my mouth; Mother loved this album. Thanks to her incessant playing of it, I, who was never particularly inclined towards music, know every song on it by heart. **

**         After she died, I swore I would never disturb anything in this room again, keep it as a shrine to her spirit; yet I can't even seem to conjure surprise at my actions as I slide the thin vinyl disk from the sleeve, place it down upon the Victrola, set the needle in the groove.      **

**           That voice, mournful and smoky, the background voice of my younger days, slithers through the attic, filling with sound as surely as a candle would fill it with light. Accusing, controlled, as elegantly bitter as poison. "_Now you say you love me; you've cried the whole night through. Well, you can cry me a river…"_**

**        The trapdoor creaks, rattles, yawns wide, a fleshy hand grasping hold of the handle. Mother pokes her head through the aperture, blinking indignantly, shielding her eyes to squint through the darkness. "Otto? What on earth are you doing, playing with my records?"**

**        "I'm sorry, Mother," I apologise immediately. "I don't know what…" I hesitate. "I just felt like hearing some music, that's all."**

**        She hrrrmph's, although I can tell she's secretly pleased; she didn't think I liked this kind of music that much. "Well, come down. Supper's just about ready. And your father just got home; you should say hello to him?"**

**          "Whatever for?"**

**She gives me her severest look. "_Otto_…"**

**I throw up my hands in mock surrender. "All right. All right. Just give me a moment."**

**She nods, satisfied that she has won, and disappears down the stairs. I gather the folds of my coat around myself, run a cursory hand through my hair, and follow after her. The record continues to play, but I am aware of it only vaguely now; it's nothing more than background noise.**

**         The sound of the television, turned up full blast, greets me as I descend the staircase into the living room; sports, as usual, car racing this time around. All I can see of him is the back of his thick head, rolls of muscle bunched around his hairy neck. In the dining area, Mother sets the plates out upon the table; a wave of guilt washes over me, and, careful not to make too much noise, not to alert him to my presence, I cross over to the table, gently take the plates from Mother's hands. They are soft and cold, and smell of lavender, dishwashing liquid, and ashes.**

**          She looks surprised, though not unpleasantly so. "You want to help me set the table, sweetie?"**

**    "I…" I clear my throat. "I was thinking perhaps we could eat in the living room tonight."**

**     She laughs, gently places her hands on my shoulders, pushes me into a dining chair. "Oh, honey. I know you're uncomfortable sitting here now, but honestly, it doesn't bother me."**

**    "It…doesn't?" I ask uncertainly, wondering if we are talking about the same thing.**

**"Of course not." She sets down the salad bowl in the middle of the table, places an empty glass on the coaster in front of me. "It wasn't your fault. Not _entirely_." She sighs, in a melodramatic fashion. "Some girls, well…they're just trouble right from the get-go. Just nasty, brazen little tarts." She gives me a sideways look, difficult to interpret, as she busies herself in the kitchen. "Most men with some sense of _pride_," she murmurs, "Would know to stay away from girls like that."**

**            My face begins to burn. "Girls like _her_."**

**"Beg your pardon, dear?" she enquires delicately, stirring the contents of the steaming pot on the stove.**

**    "You mean, girls like her. Don't you? Girls like Mary Jane."**

**Mother shrugs. "Well, dear, you said it, I didn't."**

**I shake my head. "She isn't actually like that, Mother. You would like her. Really, you would. She just…made a mistake. That's all."**

**          A guffaw, familiar, mocking, chilling my bones to the marrow, erupts from the living-room armchair. "That's not _all_ she made, is it, kiddo?" A snort. "Or, well, tried to make, anyhow. Put a stop to _that _pretty quickly, didn'tcha, Tubby?"**

**         I stare ahead of myself, feel my fists clench as if in the grip of a spasm. Mother frowns, purses her lips. "He did the right thing, Torbert. What kind of a relationship could he possibly have with a girl like that?"**

**    "Hell, Mary – girls like that, you don't have _relationships_ with." He leans out from the armchair, the sickly light of the television distorting his grinning, fatuous face, highlighting every scar, every rough stretch of stubble, all the emblems of the working man he is so proud to call himself. "Of course, any hope you might've had in _that _direction was pretty much shot right outta the water, right, kid?" He shakes his head, chuckling nastily. "What a stud you turned out to be. What a stallion. Chick starts crying and you leap offa her like her tits have caught fire or something."**

**         Mother grimaces in disgust, but says nothing, keeps stirring. For my part, I am rigid, sightless, at the table; my broken fingernails dig deep into the palms of my hands.**

**"You," I say, finally and slowly, the words grinding out of my voice-box one by one, "Are not real. You were killed years ago by a staph infection, resulting from an accident at the construction site. I know this. I watched you die."**

**           Father laughs, spreads his arms wide. "Hey. I'm _here_, ain't I? Hey, Mary," he calls into the kitchen, "That dinner cold yet or what?"**

**     "It's _coming_, Torbert," Mother grates out.**

**"Anyway," he continues, putting his feet up in a leisurely motion, "I can't say as I'm _surprised _that you didn't manage to break off a piece. Not surprised that she split pretty soon after, either. You always did have problems holding onto your women, huh, boy?"**

**     Is it possible to kill someone you know is already dead? "That is none of your business," I reply through clenched teeth.**

**        "Yeah, none of 'em seemed to stick around that long," he goes on blithely. "Not that there were that many of them to begin with. Ah, hell, maybe you're better off, kiddo. Women…they get mad, y'know, they cry. Make you feel things you don't want to." He shrugs. "Who knows? Maybe it's best that this one's gone, too. Looked like you were getting too attached to her, anyway."**

**     "Point One: I was – am – not 'attached' to her," I say furiously. "We have a mutually beneficial partnership. That is all."**

**     He snickers. "Riiiight. You've just 'grown accustomed to her face', is that it?"**

**"Such a remark only goes to prove my earlier point that you are not really my father," I shoot back, as Mother tsk-tsks and places a dish of casserole on the table before me. "Even a literary allusion as elementary as that would have been beyond _his _capacities."**

**    "A lit'ry whosit?" he asks, swigging from a can of beer.**

**"That's more like it," I reply; Mother ladles food onto the plate in front of me. Absently, automatically, I begin to eat, despite the fact that I am not hungry. "And, Point Two: Mary Jane is not 'gone'. She is coming back. Soon. Very soon. She told me so herself, and I have no reason to doubt her."**

**    "I'd say you have plenty of reason to doubt _her_, dear," Mother murmurs dubiously. **

**"Got that right, Mary," Father rejoins. "C'mon, Otto, even you can't be that thick. You and me, we both know she ain't coming back."**

**        "You're wrong!" I snap, feeling a pulse beginning to beat inside my temples.**

**"I don't think so. Oh, sure, maybe she'll come on back to live here with you, hang around the house, maybe even letcha give her a tumble this time around. She won't really have come back, though." He gives me what passes for a meaningful look, takes a philosophical pull off his beer, exhales in satisfaction, smacks his lips together. Taking his time, the old bastard.**

**          "One thing you never did, Otto. You've done all sorts of things, yeah, some of 'em pretty far gone - but not what _she's_ gonna do. You never killed your old man. Never had the stones when you were younger, and then it was too late, right? And now you're gonna let that girl go off and destroy herself just for what you never had the balls to do. She comes back – if she comes back – you won't have her, you'll have an empty shell, all burned out inside." He shakes his head in mock sorrow. "_Pret-ty_ screwed up, you ask me. 'Course, you been a screw-up since forever, anyway, so whaddaya expect?"**

**    "She is _not _going to destroy herself!" I snarl, my voice growing strangled, oddly high-pitched. "And if I never killed you, you disgusting old swine, I can assure you, it was purely due to a lack of opportunity. I'm proud of what she's doing. Deeply proud. It is exactly what I would've done."**

**          "That's true. But then, you don't like yourself very much, honey," Mother smiles beatifically, as she pours milk into my glass.**

**I blink, not having the faintest idea as to how I should respond to this. Father laughs uproariously.**

**    "Ahhh…good one, Mary."**

**I bow my head, clamping my eyes shut, pressing my fingers to my temples, so hard they could almost penetrate through to my skull. "Leave me alone," I mutter beneath my suddenly short, rasping breaths. "You aren't even real. Just leave me alone."**

**         "Kid's talking to himself, Mary," I hear him sneer.**

**"That's the first sign of madness, isn't it?" she asks innocently.**

**I slam the palms of my hands down upon the tabletop so hard it hurts, sending messages of pain shooting up my nerve-endings. "Leave me ALONE!" I cry.**

**           And I am alone.**

**No plates upon the table. No salad, no casserole. The television is off. The stove is cold. The armchair and the kitchen are both empty. An icy wind moans, softly, near-imperceptibly, through the crack in the living-room windowpane. My whole body is wracked by a violent shiver.**

**        That's it. **

**I cannot remain here one single moment longer.**

**_==_**

**The street lamps reflect, blurs of failing luminescence, in the dark puddles of rainwater that bestrew this empty street. The wind cuts through me; I wrap my plain brown coat around myself tighter, sink deeper into its folds, adjust the brim of my hat. The sun will not show itself for hours to come; if it rains again, as it surely will, then it will not show itself at all.**

**        It was only after I left that house that I was able to come up with a reason for doing so. I'm going to a store, buy a packet of cigarettes. I'll sit on a bench in the park and smoke them, one by one, until dawn. It isn't that I'm afraid to go home. Not at all. I just need some air, that's all.**

**       I dare not think about what it was that drove me to leave the house. Such thoughts lead to a dark place, a mad place. I am not mad. Sleep-deprived, perhaps. Unwilling to be left on my own. Perhaps. But I know I am not mad. **

**      I pass by a large, sleek building, dark and slender, arching gracefully into the stratosphere. A gold-plated plaque, chiselled with flowing, elegant script, reads_: Julienne Academy of Ballet_. The name rings a bell; I seem to see it, scribbled upon lined notepaper, in a rushed and feminine hand. It was one of the places on Mary Jane's list, one of the bastions of beauty she and I hoped to topple. And topple it we shall, when she comes back. To celebrate. It will be my gift to her. **

**       I must stop thinking of her, dwelling upon her return. I am falling into a pattern I dislike, an endless loop from which I must extricate myself. When Hades allowed Persephone to leave him, he gave her a handful of pomegranate seeds; eating them bound her forever to his world, to the underworld. If only _I_ could have such an ironclad guarantee.**

**         For the first time in a long while, I feel lost. Wayward. Empty inside. Why this should be so, I have no idea; only that feeling, that eternal bleating in the background of my mind, gives me a clue: that feeling that something is going, or will go, terribly wrong.**

**      I close my eyes, walk along the street blind, feeling my breath rushing past my lips in a frozen cloud. Escape. That's what it's all about. The search for an escape, for a way out, an emergency hatch. I open my eyes just as I set foot in front of a tavern, run-down, seedy, smoky windows sealing it away from the cold world outside. Mary Jane found her escape in alcohol, at least for a while, perhaps for only a night. One night, sinking into eternity, allowing it to wash over your head and drown everything you feel, everything you are. That's all I really need right now. One night of nothingness. One night of no longer being who I am.**

**        I take a breath, and push against the smeared glass door.**

**The interior of the bar is every bit as dismal as the exterior. More so. The light is a sick, flickering yellow, giving the three ashen alcoholics perched on the ripped barstools a jaundiced look. The floor is uncarpeted, coated in muddy boot-tracks, the smell of spilled beer seeping up from it, infecting the sinuses. Two threadbare pool tables. A jukebox in one corner, which is, dispiritingly enough, playing one of those vapid 1960s girl group songs that Mary Jane so adores. "_And you can never go home any more..."_           **

**         None of this is particularly conducive to making me want to stay, but I remind myself that the setting doesn't matter, nothing around me matters, and make my way resolutely to the bar.**

**      The barman, fiftyish and ungainly, gazes at me through tired, bloodshot eyes, arms folded in a resigned kind of posture. "What's your poison?"**

**      How apt. I study the dusty bottles on the shelf behind him; it's been so many years since last I was truly intoxicated that it is difficult for me to remember what got me drunk within the shortest space of time. "Tequila, thank you," I finally say. The barman nods, ducks down, resurfaces with a cracked shot glass and a bottle of amber liquid; he up-ends the latter quickly over the former and slides it across to me. I catch it, down it, and shudder; heat flashes through my body, the alcohol thick on my tongue. I pour out another one, gulp that one down, too.**

**      "You might want to take it easy there," the bartender drawls, the indifference of his tone belying the concern of his words. "That rotgut's strong stuff."**

**       "I know," I say shortly, studying the grimy surface of the bar.**

**"You okay there?"**

**I give a short, flat laugh. "Don't I seem 'okay'?"**

**He leans on the edge of the bar, studies me with a squint. "Not really. If you don't mind my saying so. Look a little down. Like you lost someone, maybe." He shrugs. "Hey, what do I know. None'a my business, right?"**

**       "That's right," I say coldly, and pour out another shot. I slug it back, growing more accustomed to the taste, to the burning sensation in the pit of my stomach. "And I haven't lost anyone," I add, a touch too loudly; I feel a sudden need to convince this man that he is wrong in his assessment of me. "Not permanently, anyway. She is coming back."**

**      "Ah," says the barman, smirking slightly in triumph. "It's a 'she'. Yeah. I kinda guessed it."**

**    I scowl, fill up my glass again in silence, wondering why I bothered to volunteer such information to a total stranger.**

**        Unfortunately, he seems unwilling to let it go. "Hell, I'd say most guys come in here, it's 'cause of a 'she', know what I mean?" He chuckles huskily, his laugh a dry rasp. "Women. More trouble than they're worth."**

**        "No woman controls me," I mutter darkly as I drink. **

**The barman sighs. "Ah, we'd all like to think so. But look around you." He sweeps an arm in the direction of the barflies, none of whom seem to acknowledge or take any offense at this. "Here we all are."**

**      I look up at him sharply; despite the fact that he cannot see my eyes, I know he feels them, for his own widen slightly, and he takes an involuntary step back. "Kindly stop talking to me," I growl.**

**       He raises his arms in a helpless gesture, and turns away, busying himself once again. I pour out another shot, raise it to eye level, study the light refracting through its liquid depths. My head feels oddly light, my tongue loose, sliding around inside my mouth.**

**      "We're not lovers," I say.**

**The barman turns back around, one eyebrow raised. "Sorry?"**

**"She and I. We're not lovers. We're not friends. Partners, maybe." I consider it. "Yes, that works. Partners. That phrase covers a whole range of possibilities." I laugh, once, a harsh sound, like the report of a rifle. "A multitude of sins. Yes." I drink.**

**      The barman doesn't seem to know how to respond to this. I can't honestly say that I blame him. Another shot. I feel very warm, all my limbs, even my artificial ones, tingling ever so slightly.**

**       "I wouldn't ordinarily be here, you know," I remark, apropos of nothing; I feel I owe him some sort of explanation. "In a place like this. I kept her away from alcohol for as long as I could. She'd probably say I was being hypocritical. But she's not here now, so I don't suppose it matters. Does it?"**

**       "Well, like you said," the bartender replies, picking up my glass and giving it a smooth wipe with a washcloth, "She is coming back, so I wouldn't get myself into too ragged a state, if I were you."**

**       "Coming back..." I repeat dully, watching, almost hypnotised, as the cloth passes across the surface of my glass, making it shine. I practically snatch it out of his hand as he sets it down again, pour another shot, down it. Am I drunk? I don't feel drunk. Surely it would take longer than this to make me drunk. (Or is that 'get' me drunk? Oh, well.)**

**       "In the beginning," I say, sloshing the liquid in my glass around in an absent fashion, "I let her get away from me. Leave me, I mean. But it was different then. I was so confident, so utterly confident, that she'd come back. And she did. I was right."**

**      "Well, there you go," he says off-handedly. "Guess you just gotta trust her."**

**I laugh again, this time longer, louder than before. "There isn't a single person in this entire city who trusts her. My own mother told me not to trust her. But I don't think it was actually my mother..." I add, furrowing my brow. The lights are very bright in here, rather painful. "I don't know. I really don't know what that was all about. Have you ever," I ask suddenly, hopefully, "Seen people you know aren't alive any more? Talking to you? Telling you things you'd rather not hear?"**

**       He is beginning to look slightly uncomfortable. "Can't say as I have, man."**

**"Ah. Just me, then," I say, shrug, and down another shot. I squint at the bottle. "It's empty."**

**     "Sure is."**

**"Am I drunk?" I ask him. I assume he would know.**

**He nods slowly. "Possibly. Very possibly."**

**I shake my head. "Then it's not nearly enough." I hold out my glass, wave it pointedly. "Give me another."**

**       He frowns. "You know, I really don't think..."**

**"Another!" I bellow, slamming a hand down upon the table. Beneath my coat, my tentacles writhe in a threatening manner. **

**        The bartender doesn't notice this, or maybe he does; either way, he's sufficiently intimidated to pour me another shot, which is what matters. I knock it back, motion to him to keep them coming. **

**        She'd be arriving in Arizona right about now.**

**It's going to be a long night.**

**_==_**

**Has it been an hour already? That clock doesn't seem too clear. The numbers are blurred, wavy. I peer closer, trying to make some sense of it; actually, I think _two_ hours might have passed. Been sitting here drinking for two hours. Something about alcohol poisoning flashes across my mind, but doesn't remain; besides, I'm filled with so much poison already that it should counteract any ill-effects. My brain stews, simmers, a kind of dank rage bubbling up inside me, the rage that's never really that far from the surface anyway. The bartender is saying something about not being legally able to serve me any more, but since when does the law apply to me? That's what I'd like to know.**

**         "Listen," I state with dignity, trying not to sway too much, even though the rest of the room seems to be doing just that, "I can't stop drinking now. I haven't forgotten her yet. I'm not...not..." What's the word? "Unconscious," I continue smoothly. "Unconscious of myself. I can still think and I still know who I am." I hang my head, shake it slowly. "I don't feel very well," I mutter. "Something dreadful is going to happen."**

**        "If you keep packing 'em away like that much longer, you bet it will," rejoinders the bartender, discreetly trying to take my glass away.**

**        "Do you think it's my fault?" I ask him, suddenly urgent. **

**"I'm sure it's not," he says vaguely, not knowing what I mean, not caring. The jukebox is playing again, softly this time; someone has elected to play a song I don't recognise but could easily qualify as the single most depressing piece of music ever written. "_To think we can find happiness, hidden in a kiss_," sighs the disembodied, melancholy voice. _"Ah, to think we can find happiness - that's the greatest mistake there is..."_ **

**      "Did you ever..." I swallow. "Did you ever do something, and it felt right at the time, and you knew you were completely right to do it, but later you wondered if it was really for the best that you _had_ done it? I mean, say you wanted to prove a point that was totally, one hundred per cent correct, so you found someone and you did something to her that _did_ prove that point, proved it perfectly. But then, what if, maybe, even though you were right, it maybe ended up hurting that person, even though they didn't know it, and that hurt _you_, and your being right just didn't really seem that important any more?"**

**        The bartender says nothing, keeps his eyes down, polishes the glass.**

**"I didn't wreck her life," I say firmly. "I made it better, so much better. I did _not_ destroy her. Did I?"**

**       The barman sighs, slings his washcloth over one shoulder, places his hands on his hips. "Look, buddy. I think you're about as sloshed as you're ever gonna get. I think you gotta leave now. Go home, sleep it off. Wait for your girl."**

**       "All I ever do these days," I reply, "Is wait for my girl." I lean my head on the palm of my hand, slide crooked fingers through my hair. "It didn't used to be this way," I mumble. "I didn't used to be this way. People _feared_ me. They still _do_ fear me! But now they fear...us. Her and me."**

**      One of the barflies, an unshaven, plaid-shirted brute in a trucker's hat, a few seats away from me, snorts loudly. "Be pretty surprising to find anyone's afraid of _you_, pal."**

**      Slowly, I turn to him, my eyes narrowing. "I beg your pardon?"**

**He snickers, shakes his head, turns back to his beer. "Pussywhipped son of a bitch," I hear him mutter.**

**      The black rage inside my head fizzes, percolates. Any second now, it will run over, spill into my blood. "Would you care to repeat that?" I ask softly, drawing stealthily to my feet.**

**      The bartender looks nervously back and forth between us. "Hey, look, fellas, I don't need any - "**

**      I slam a tentacle down onto the bar; his eyes grow huge, and he leaps back. "Jesus!"**

**The barfly, still nursing his beer, doesn't notice. I keep my eyes focused upon him, my vision narrowed through a tunnel of descending darkness. My pulse is quickening, in fury, in anticipation.  "Repeat. What. You. Said." **

**       He chuckles, and looks up. "I said, 'pussywhipped son of a bitch'. 'Kay, man? 'Cause that's what you are. Spent the whole night bitchin' and moanin' about some piece of ass, and then - " He finally looks over at me, sees the tentacle on the bar. It's an interesting thing, to see all the blood drain out of a man's face within the space of a minute. "Oh. No."**

**      "Oh, _yessss_," I hiss. **

**With a sound of shredding cloth, my tentacles explode out of my coat, shining, beautiful, deadly limbs of steel, curling and twisting to the rooftops, almost entirely filling the small room. The other two barflies shriek, rush towards the door; I sweep out my right tentacle, block their path, shove them back so violently they fall, skid across the filthy floor.**

**      The third barfly sits on his stool, rooted to the spot, able to do nothing but stare; I slowly make my way over to him, taking care not to swagger on my feet, and stand before him. I am unable to keep the smile from my face as I clasp his chin within the claws of one tentacle. "Do you know," I breathe, "I really ought to thank you. This is just what I think I've been needing."**

**        And, still holding him by the chin, I lift him off the stool, high into the air; feel the crack of his breaking jawbone as it travels along the length of my tentacle. Behind me, I hear an overly familiar _snick-snack_; without letting the barfly down, I spin on my heel, smack the shotgun out of the bartender's hands, deal him a blow to the forehead that sends him to the ground, blood oozing from within the depths of his hair.**

**        I turn back to the barfly, held aloft within my claws, limp as a ragdoll, moaning insensibly. "Still find it hard to believe," I ask, "That anyone would be afraid of me?"**

**      "I sure don't. Oh, wait. Did you say 'afraid of' or 'amused by'?"**

**That voice penetrates through the alcoholic haze, cuts through to the core of my brain, finds the black and oozing centre of all my hatred. It is, of course, and could only be...**

**         Spider-Man crouches, gangly as his arachnid namesake, his gaudy costume the only bright colors to be seen in this dismal place, upon the wall above the jukebox, gazing at me with his usual insolent stare. "I mean, there's just _got_ to be a joke like this out there somewhere," he continues blithely. "You know - 'an octopus walks into a bar...'"**

**         I growl, hurl the barfly as hard as I can; Spider-Man darts away, the barfly smashing into the wall, collapsing onto the jukebox, accompanied by the sound of breaking glass; he hits the floor, lies still.**

**        I lash out, unbalanced, blinded by loathing and drink; he evades me with maddening ease, seizes hold of the tentacle, uses its momentum to leap into the air; an explosion of pain as his heel connects with my jaw. I stumble backward, regaining balance only thanks to my tentacles; I snatch at him again, catch him this time, smack him against the wall; I feel his spine jarring, the plaster cracking, but, to his credit, he does not cry out. My grip is, however, apparently less secure than I'd thought, because he manages to squirm out of the tentacle's grasp, leaps onto the ceiling in a single, agile motion.**

**         "Well, that was a little sad, Otto," he comments, vaulting over my other tentacle as it swoops in for an attack, dropping down to the floor. "I had playground slap-fights in third grade that did more damage than you just managed to."**

**        "I'll _kill_ you," I grind out.**

**"Oh, that's original." Another lash of the tentacle; another leap away, this time hurtling towards me; I see his fist coming, but do nothing to stop it from connecting with my face. My jaw, already badly bruised, feels as though it will splinter, and my nose gushes blood; but surrender is out of the question, and besides, all the physical pain in the world is preferable to what I've been suffering lately. I just wish I could focus better, that's all. Stop the world from dipping and swaying.**

**       "And what's a nice guy like you doing in a place like this, anyway?" the web-slinger goes on, leaping in for another punch, which I block. "Hey, different strokes and everything, but speaking for myself, this place has way too much of a Charles Bukowski thing going on."**

**         "You know," I hiss, "It's aspects of my life like you that I came here in order to forget." Immediately, I regret having said this.**

**      He peers at me. "Oh, my God," he finally says, voice filled with dawning glee. "You're...you're _tanked_, aren't you? Hammered. Sloshed. Shickered." He laughs uproariously, shaking his head, folding his arms. "Oh, this is just too great. After all these years, it's like a whole new side of you has suddenly revealed itself to me. I mean, seriously, do you have any idea how _long_ I've been waiting for the opportunity to rhyme 'Otto' with 'Blotto'?"**

**         I snarl, strike out, knock his feet out from underneath him; he falls backwards onto the palms of his hands, scurries, in what could only be described as a spider-walk, back up onto the wall, where he gazes down upon me, chuckling condescendingly.**

**       "Now I wonder, what could have driven a super-stable guy like you to drink, Otto?" He cocks his head to one side. "Woman trouble, maybe?" It might be my imagination, but I think I detect an undercurrent of steel in his voice.**

**       I bark out a mirthless laugh. "Oh, you don't know the _half_ of it, wall-crawler." I lick my lips, taste the lingering burn of the alcohol, mixed now with the metallic flavor of my own blood. "You must feel quite satisfied. You probably think you've won. But you haven't. She's coming back to me. She told me. Promised."**

**        That gets a reaction. "Coming back? What are you talking about?"**

**I slam a tentacle into the ceiling; one of the light fixtures comes loose, crashes to the ground in a brief eruption of glass, a rain of plaster following in its wake. He leaps down, lands atop me, his fist smashing into my nose; I feel a crunching sensation, wonder if it's broken again, but if it is, the tequila seems to be shielding me from feeling its full effects. His momentum, however, knocks me off my feet, and we crash into the ruins of the jukebox, my tentacles flailing wildly all around.**

**        He seizes me by the collar, hauls my face close to his. "What do you mean, 'she's coming back'?" he demands, and I feel an immense satisfaction that he is finally treating this in all seriousness. "Isn't she with you?"**

**      "Do you honestly think," I growl, "That I would be in a place like this if she was?"**

**He slams my head against the tiled floor; a fresh spasm of pain. "Where is she?"**

**     Something clicks inside the murky haze that is my mind; an idea, so simple and so perfect, seizes hold of my imagination. Spider-Man. Of course. The one person alive who was ever able to defeat me. He can find her. He can stop her before she kills her father, before she wrecks herself, before she becomes a hollowed-out shell. Save her from herself. Bring her back to New York. Back to me. **

**        Why didn't I think of this before?**

**"She's in Arizona," I hear myself saying. "Gone to Tucson, Arizona. To the Toussaint Nursing Home..."**

**      He eyes me in something approaching disbelief. "What? Arizona? But why?"**

**"Because," I say slowly, drawing it out one word at a time, "The Toussaint Nursing Home, in Tucson, Arizona..."**

**      "_What?"_**

**"The Toussaint Nursing Home, in Tucson, Arizona, is where her father lives. And when she gets to him..." I begin to laugh, drunkenly, despairingly, "She is going to kill him."**

**       Spider-Man drops me so quickly you would almost imagine that my words have burned him. He leaps to his feet, staring down at me. "You're lying."  
       I shake my head, gesture towards the door. "She left two days ago. I would think she'd be arriving quite soon, now." I feel a hideous, malevolent grin stretch my features. "If I were you, I wouldn't waste any more time, little spider."**

**        He stares at me a while longer; he jerks a hand out, stabs a finger in my direction. "This is not over," he hisses. "Not by an _incredibly_ long shot."**

**       "Go," I whisper.**

**And he does, racing out the door, leaving it swinging wildly behind him.**

**In the street beyond, I hear the distant sound of police sirens drawing closer; the barman must have tripped a silent alarm at some point or another. Sighing, I haul myself to my feet, slip quietly out the door and into the night beyond. It has been raining, and the air is fresh, cold and clean. I can see the blurred shapes of the streetlights reflected in the slick black pavement. My tentacles do the majority of the work involved in getting me home in one piece; my legs feel like rubber bands, and I am only faintly conscious that my body is aching. **

**       I make my way up Arbor Street, not bothering to take the rooftops, not caring if anyone sees me. I'm tired, all of a sudden; tired as I have never been in my entire life, tired as though I have been wandering a desert or a jungle, not the streets of New York. At the door I search my pockets with clumsy fingers for the key; unable to find it, I allow one tentacle to pick the lock. I lean against the door as it opens, slamming it against the wall as I stagger inside.**

**       Every light is off; nothing stirs amid the shadows. The place is exactly as empty as I left it, so many hours ago. Well, what did I expect, after all?**

**      I don't remember climbing the staircase, although I must have done so, because the next thing I know I'm opening the door to my parents' room, stumbling inside, collapsing onto the warm, soft, welcoming bed. As I fall asleep, my face nestled in the pillow, I detect the faint smell of flowers on the sheets; the scent of her, the proof that she was once here, the trace of her that remains when everything else is gone.**

**_==_**

_The webs shoot out, one after another, relentless in the dark, wrapping around lamp-post, flagpole, telegraph wire, and all Spider-Man can hear is the pounding of his own heart, all he can taste is his own panic. There's every chance that_ _Ock was lying. Every chance that this is all a ruse. MJ wouldn't kill her own father, surely, surely not..._

_        Even as he tries to convince himself of it, he knows it is a lie. He feels it, feels the truth of what Ock has told him. Mary Jane is hell-bent, he knows that; driving herself to the limit, testing how far she can go before she self-destructs. To kill her father would be to kill herself, and that's exactly what she wants._

_          That's exactly what he's got to stop._

_Later, the airport baggage-handlers will swear up and down that they had no idea there was a stowaway aboard Flight 397 to Arizona. Much less, they will state firmly, did they have any idea that that stowaway was a superpowered vigilante, possibly a mutant, who had been vilified on a near-weekly basis by the _Daily Bugle_ for the last decade or so._

_         No, they didn't catch a glimpse, that rainy early morning, of a flash of blue and red streaking over their heads as they loaded the luggage into the belly of the plane. No, they didn't notice the traces of something that looked like webbing on the edge of the door - it was late, it was dark, how could they?_

_       J. Jonah Jameson will write a blistering editorial excoriating these two baggage-handlers for their carelessness and lack of observance. It will cost them their jobs._

_       All of this will come later, though. Much later. After it is all over._

**_==_**

_Now_

Philip James Watson is my father.

And I'm on my way to Tucson, Arizona because that's where I'm going to kill him.

     I adjust my eyepatch, flick Brenda around experimentally; the view in my right eye whirls up, down and around correspondingly. On the radio, over and above the crackling static, Lee Hazlewood growls a threat: "_Some velvet morning when I'm straight, I'm gonna open up your gate_..." I remember this song from when I was a little kid; it used to scare me so badly that I'd demand Mom turn it off every time she tried to play it. It doesn't scare me any more, though. Nothing does.

        A large rectangular shadow looms by the side of the road, backlit by the dawn; as I draw closer, I can see that it's a billboard, painted in a tasteless shade of green, faded now by the ceaseless rays of the sun; in cheerful yellow lettering, it greets me: _Welcome to Tucson! _How nice of it. And in the distance, I see the city itself, a tiny dollhouse city scorched red by the sun.

      I do. I do feel welcome. To Tucson.

**_==_**

The Toussaint Nursing Home is right at the end of a shady, elm-lined street, wide as a boulevard, quieter than the desert. As I draw closer, the Caddy's engine roaring in my ears, I can see that it looks like a nice place, large, well-designed, spacious. A well-tended flower garden out front, a big picture window overlooking it. Comfortable enough to accommodate a great many people in need of peace and quiet in their twilight years.

       I sit there a few metres off, idling, my head on one side as I watch the place through one slitted eye, the sun winking off the black plastic of my eyepatch.

       "One," I say calmly; behind me, Brenda writhes in anticipation. "Two. Three. Four...

"Five."

      I stomp down on the gas as hard as I can; the car screams into life, barrelling down the road; my hair whips and lashes my face and shoulders, my knuckles are pure white on the wheel, sweat streaks away from my face and I scream like a goddamn banshee; the flower beds rear up, are crushed underneath my wheels, and I only barely catch sight of horrified elderly faces leaping away from the picture window as I drive this son of a bitch right through it.

       The whole universe explodes in a shower of crystal; my skin feels as if it's being bitten into all over, blood runs down my arms, stains my shirt an even deeper red, but my system has gone into override mode, ignoring everything but the driving rhythm of my own heart. Even the bone-shaking thump of the car hitting the ground, of floorboards cracking underneath its weight, doesn't faze me; I leap out of the Caddy before it's even stopped moving, my eyes wild, my nostrils flaring, teeth clenched as hard as my fists.

         All around me, total pandemonium. Poor old people screaming, clutching their chests, running away. They'll be okay. It's not any of them I'm looking to hurt.

       "DADDEEEEEEEE!" I howl.

A couple of orderlies, dressed in white, burly, rush towards me; irritated, I knock them aside with a sweep of my tentacle, and stride forward, heading purposefully down a corridor, following the general crush of panicking humanity. Choosing at random, I allow Brenda to seize hold of a male nurse, slam him against the wall. "Where's Philip Watson?" I demand.

       "I - I - I - " he stutters; I slam him back harder.

"_Philip Watson!"_ I bellow.

"Ah - ah - Room 206!" he squeaks. I let him drop, stalk away. So much for the nursing profession's unshakeable commitment to the patient.

       I swing round a corner, through another corridor; that nursing-home scent thick in my nostrils, that smell of cleaning fluid and linen and age. The walls are covered in peeling paper, cream-colored, patterned with tiny bunches of brown flowers. Every so often, a picture, usually a landscape or a rural scene. I don't really absorb any of this; my stare is fized straight ahead of me, my mind a writhing mass of snakes, my blood an electrified current inside me.

         Room 206. Shabby wooden door, scuff marks at the bottom. I kick it in, feel it splinter around my boot. My head whirls, vertigo is setting in.

         Dad's room. One single bed, the covers made up neatly, tucked in, hospital corners. The same wallpaper, the same prints in frames. Sunlight filtering in through thin gauze curtains. And pressed into the corner. Frozen like a deer. Able to do nothing, nothing more, than stare and stare and stare.

       Dad.

God. He's so..._small_ now. Old. Frail. His body, underneath the moth-eaten red robe and blue-and-white striped pyjamas, is bent and bowed, sticklike and pathetic. His hair and mustache are pure white, and the lines on his horsey face are so deep they look like scars. Liver spots, intertwined with ropey blue veins, dot his pale, shaking hands; his eyes are yellow, bloodshot, filled with uncomprehending fear.

        "I remember you," I hear myself saying out loud, as I take one step into the room, "As a giant."

      His breaths claw their way out of his throat. He makes no attempt to speak.

"A big, tall, strong, redheaded giant," I continue, moving slowly closer. "And it was your world we all lived in. Mom, Gayle and me. And we were all terrified of you."

       "Mary Jane..." he croaks; even his voice has faded, aged.

"Even after we got away from you," I go on, "It wasn't enough. You still had to take everything from us, everything you could. All Mom's money...Did you know she died soon after that?"

      He opens his mouth, closes it, then nods. "Gayle..."

"Oh, yeah. I guess she would've told you." I adjust one of the prints on the walls, try to avoid looking at him, try to avoid thinking about how fragile he looks now. Keep him in my mind's eye, as he was, as I remember him. Keep the monster in view. "God. It's been a long time. I should ask you all sorts of questions. How've you been? How's life been treating you? You ever finish that novel?" I laugh sadly.

        "Mary Jane..." he begins hesitantly. "I never did mean to hurt you."

"Oh, that's just something people _say_, isn't it, Dad? The all-purpose excuse. Like if you didn't know what you were doing, that makes it okay." I lower my brows in his direction; my voice descends into a serpentine hiss. "You ruined my _life_. Did you know that? So many things I've done, so many things I can't do, because of _you."_

        "I know I screwed up, MJ," Dad tries, his voice trembling, either with fear or some other emotion, I can't tell. Don't pay attention to it. He's been a liar his whole life. Don't pay attention. "I know I treated you and Gayle and your mom badly. I know, and I'm sorry. I kept trying to do the best I could, but my best was never good enough..."

      I slam Brenda into the wall; veins of cracked plaster travel all the way up to the ceiling. "The best you COULD?!" I scream. "_Screw you!_ I'm ruined because of you! I'm a monster because of you! Everything, everything in my world has gone to hell because of you! And you _stand_ there, you old son of a bitch, and you tell me with a straight face that you _did the best you could_?!"

       A more familiar look descends upon his features; a hard, cold look, an unforgiving and cruel look. "You know what? I don't care if you believe me. I don't care what you think of me. I mean, really, am I supposed to get down on my knees and beg forgiveness, Mary Jane?" he asks bitingly. "Am I supposed to cry and scream and tell you that everything you are is because of what happened years and years ago?" He shakes his head. "Oh, MJ. I knew you weren't that bright, but, Christ - I never thought you'd do anything _this_ stupid."

         He seems stronger, taller, as if the years have fallen away and he's the adult once more, I the child. I can feel this situation starting to slip away from me. I can feel all the power I have starting to drain out of me. "I'm going to kill you," I whisper. "Do you understand that?"

       "You can try, honey," he says, an obscene gentleness in his voice, a grown-up indulging a little kid. "You can try."

       I shriek, send Brenda flying in his direction; he ducks, and I'm surprised at his agility, his speed, even at his advanced age; he rushes past me, shoves me to one side, dashes out into the corridor. I spin around, race out after him.

        He's far ahead of me, speeding around the corner up ahead; I pursue, blinded by a rage so intense that I can taste it, ashen and bitter in my mouth, like arsenic; Brenda, whipped into just as towering a fury, lashes from side to side, smashing holes in the walls as I run along.

       I round another corner, look around wildly; the loud squeal of a rusted door-hinge draws my attention, and I look over just in time to see a shadow disappearing down a darkened staircase framed by a narrow doorway. On the slimy brick of the wall, a sign reads: _This Way to Swimming Area._

      I rush over, stand in the doorway, looking down into the darkness; the stone steps curve down in a rough spiral, beaded with droplets of water, as if they're sweating - unsurprising, considering that an infernal heat rises up from the unseen pool area below, plastering my bangs to my forehead. I make my way down, careful not to slip; Brenda clings to the wall beside me, holding my balance. I don't need to rush this. He's basically trapped down here; might as well have hidden in the basement. I can afford to take my time.

       Gradually, a glimmer of watery blue light up ahead greets my eyes, a foxfire luminescence in the impenetrable dark. I step down, off the last stair, into the swimming area.

       It's as big as a gymnasium, dark as a tomb; the only light available is that which is shed dimly by lights installed around the jewel-green pool itself, casting wavy aquamarine patterns all over the black tiled walls; it casts the place in an eerie, supernatural glow. Even the high windows, all along the Northern side, are tinted black, admitting no natural light. Every sound, no matter how minute, echoes off the walls, bounces away from the ceiling, dies in the watery depths of the pool. The smell of chlorine is thick in the still, dead, silent air.

        _"Dad!"_ I yell; "_Dad!" "Dad! "Dad!"_ my voice cries back to me from all around. I turn, head whipping from side to side; no sign of him, not even a giveaway footstep.

      I close my eyes, massage the lids; my eyes feel like they're burning, red with lack of sleep. Christ, it's so hard to think. But I shouldn't think, should I? If I think about this, everything will stop, and I can't afford to stop, never again. He deserves this. I deserve this. I can go home to Otto, and he'll be proud of me, and we'll live happily ever after or whatever happens after things like this...

         Why didn't he apologise? I mean really apologise? Cry and beg and whimper? Every time I fantasised about this, that's what happened. Sometimes I forgave him, sometimes not. But he didn't even give me the opportunity. He hasn't changed. He'll never change.

      Now I have to kill him. I mean, I don't have any choice. Until now, there was always this chance, this last-chance grab at redemption...But now I've just got to do it. I've just got to. I don't see any other way. There's just no way out now.

      "Don't make this _difficult_, for Christ's sake!" I yell out in frustration. "I _know_ you're here!"

"Really? Damn. I was kinda hoping to surprise you," a voice replies.

Not from anywhere close to me.

Not from ground level.

From above.

Spider-Man is framed in one of the darkened windows up on high, crouching on the pane, gazing down at me, and seeing him here is like seeing the ghost of someone you killed; it's the shock of something being so totally and utterly out of its context that it seems you must be hallucinating, that it can't really be there at all.

       "You're here," I say, because I can't figure out what else to say.

"I'm here," he responds quietly, and drops down to the ground. We stare at each other over the shimmering pool, divided by this body of emerald water.

      I haven't seen him since the night of the fashion show. I had thought that, after a while, I would forget exactly what he looked like, remember him in vague, unfocused terms: red, blue, black, a mask, white eyes. I thought he would become a stranger to me, someone I'd think of and be unable to connect to any particular feeling or memory. That or I would hate him, hate him the way Otto hates him, as a thorn in my side, disrupting my plans, spoiling my fun.

       But he's here now. And I can't feel anything other than the whistlING wind as he holds me close and we soar above the skyscrapers, held up only by a length of webbing; and his mouth on mine, as I'd push up his mask and kiss him, tasting his sweat on his lips; and the way he'd step out the bedroom window in the mornings, the sun's rays casting the colors of his costume in an even brighter shade; and the frustration, and the excitement, and the love.

       He floors me. After all this time, after everything that's happened, he still has the power to floor me.

       "Why?" I ask him softly, pacing slowly across the pool's edge, never taking my eyes off him.

     He knows what I'm talking about. Of course he does. "I have to stop you," he replies.

"Where's my father?" I ask, halting.

"I can't let you kill him."

"That's not an answer."

"It's _my_ answer."

I feel like crying and I don't know why. "I'm not looking for a fight with you," I say, keeping my voice carefully under control.

       "And you think I am?" he asks gently, and shakes his head, sighing. "Ohhh, God, MJ...how did we get here? How did things get this bad?"

    "You should know," I say, ice seeping into my voice.

He looks down. I could attack him now. I stay still. "I want to apologise," he says slowly. "I want to tell you how sorry I am, for how I reacted and the stupid thing I said. I want to tell you how I've been eating my own heart ever since that day, and how every time people talk about you, every time someone says your name, my entire life just stops and can't go any further. I want to tell you a lot of things. But I think it would just make you hate me more. So I won't."

     "You're right," I say.

He looks up.

"It _would_ make me hate you more."

A shudder runs through him, and I'm grateful that I don't have to look at his face. Finally, he straightens up, looks right at me. "You don't seriously think that's gonna be enough to get me to give up on you, do you?"

      I feel oddly trapped, oddly cornered. If only he weren't here. If only he'd stayed in New York. I don't even know how he found out about this, and I can't bring myself to care. "I can't see why you wouldn't," I say, without knowing why I'm saying it, "When even _I've_ given up on me."

       And Brenda lashes out, quicker than thought, stretching her entire length across the pool, snatching at him; he seizes hold of her, throws himself over the pool, lands only feet away from me. Holding onto Brenda, he pulls me close. "Is this really how you see yourself?" he asks, feet planted firmly onto the floor, holding on for grim death as Brenda thrashes madly. "Can you possibly hate yourself this much?"

       "I like myself just fine, thank you," I hiss, pulling Brenda free with a mighty effort and slamming her up against the back of his head; he falls forward onto his hands, springs back up again. Brenda shoots out; he dodges her, leaping backward, coming to rest upon the wall.

      "Really? Huh. And here I was thinking that people who like themselves don't generally, you know, try to destroy themselves with quite so much vigor."

       I hit out at him again; he shoots out a jet of web-fluid, trying to web Brenda to the wall, but the moisture of the surface weakens its hold, and I pull her back in with relative ease. Even though I'm not exerting myself that much, I'm breathing hard, my hair in my eyes, my teeth ground together. "It's not myself I'm trying to destroy."

        He leaps over my head, across to the wall behind me; I see him in my eyepatch, catch him in my sights, send Brenda after him; an explosion of breaking black tile is all that rewards my efforts, as he dodges me again. Why won't he fight me? Why won't he punch me, hit me, kick me, the way he does with Otto, with all the other rogues? Jesus, doesn't he even care that much?

        "You can't kill your dad, MJ. I know he's scum. I know he's a waste of flesh. I know he hurt you, and I know that pain'll never stop. But - "

      I cut him off with a piercing scream - I don't know why I do it, besides the fact that I always feel like screaming and so rarely get the chance - snatch him off the wall by one leg, and hurl him into the pool, trying to keep my grip, hold him down; but, as I knew he would, he twists around just before he hits the water and yanks hard on my tentacle, pulling me in after him.

      The splash fills my ears, deafening me, and my world turns to water, flips end over end; nothing but cold, wet darkness. I break the surface, gasping for air, hear a hissing sound, a fizzing and crackling. The eyepatch. It's not supposed to be submerged in water, not supposed to be exposed to chemicals like chlorine. I cry out as a spark bites into my flesh; I tear the useless, short-circuiting item off, throw it away. The gift Otto gave me. It's ruined. He'll be so disappointed, so disappointed in me. I've disappointed everyone, everyone, and now I'll disappoint him.

        Spider-Man seizes hold of me from behind, locks my arms behind my back. trapping Brenda against my spine. I howl, kick, thrash wildly, churning the water, great splashes of it erupting all around us.

       "Eyepatch go boom?" he asks, trying to keep the levity in his voice; I can feel his breath, through the mask, warm on the side of my neck, and a sense memory brings me back to our bed, to waking up with his face pressed against my back. God, forget it, forget it, stay focused...

      "It's for the best," he continues, raising his other arm, shooting a length of webbing up onto the edge of the diving board. "Seriously. I get that it was part of the whole villain makeover thing, but it really just made you look like a prettier version of Nick Fury."

        He pulls us up, through the air. I'm limp, unmoving, watching as droplets of water fall from the ends of my hair down into the pool below, leaving tiny blemishes on the smooth surface that soon heal over. I should keep fighting. Brenda twitches slightly, listlessly; I know he feels it, but he doesn't do anything. I'm kind of glad. I'm just so damn tired all of a sudden.

       We alight on the diving board; slowly and cautiously, he lets go of my arms, draws his away from its position around my waist. I slump down into a sitting position, my back and head bowed, not seeing or wanting to see anything other than the black curtain of my hair.

      I feel him move towards me, hesitantly; "Get the hell away!" I snap, lashing out aimlessly with my arm, not having enough strength left to move Brenda. He doesn't protest; just makes a quick, quiet, graceful leap away, landing on one of the rungs of the ladder, gazing up at me from across the board's length.

       I sit there, hunched over, my legs crossed. Brenda dangles down off the edge of the board, and I watch the water as it drips, drips, drips, down her shiny black length, off the tips of her claws. The dripping sound reverberates through the room, is the only sound left in all of creation.

       "Are you happy?" Spider-Man asks me quietly.

I look up, over at him through the weariest eyes in the world. "What?"

"Are you happy?" he repeats. "Just...in general. Living this life. Does it make you happy?"

        I don't answer. I just gaze out across the vast expanse of water stretching out underneath me, watch the glimmering patterns it throws up against the tiled wall.

       "No," I say, without thinking about it. "No. I'm not happy."

And something inside me breaks. Something just...bursts, wide open. It's not exactly like waking up, or regaining consciousness, or remembering. A light doesn't go on inside my head, my heart doesn't start to sing, there's no big angelic choir to herald the moment. It's just this quiet, quiet thing that sneaks inside me, like something held taut for months and months and then allowed to go slack. I threatened my sister, my little nephews. I tore apart businesses, livelihoods, made people scared. I tried to kill my own father.

        "I'm the worst human being in the world," I say, with infinite slowness, my voice devoid of expression. "The worst human being in the entire world."

       Spider-Man shakes his head. "Oh, no, no, MJ..."

"I've destroyed everything," I go on. "Everything around me. I tore it all up. And it didn't...didn't make any difference, did it? Everything's different, but nothing's changed. Everything inside of me is dead or dying, but nothing's actually changed."

        I hang my head again, unable to speak any more; it's washing over me now, that feeling, that thing that's burst within me. Waves and waves of it, like warm water, streaming through me. A systemwide failure. New life. Whatever you want to call it.

       A sob escapes from somewhere deep within my chest; I didn't even realise I was crying. Thought that was just water from the pool, streaming down my face. I hug myself tightly, embrace myself, because nobody else will now, nobody else should.

      Spider-Man doesn't come any closer, knows better than that. Spider-Man, the hell with that. Peter. His name is Peter. Once, I fell in love, and it was with Peter Parker.

      I look up at him, look him dead in the eye. "Do you love me?" I ask softly.

"Yes," he says. He doesn't even hesitate. This isn't a question he has to think about.

"Then why haven't you _stopped_ me yet?" And now I feel the tears as they come. My limbs are warming up. My heart is beginning to beat again. I'm coming back to life.

       Peter carefully moves up the ladder, only one rung, taking it slow. He extends one hand in my direction, the fingers loose, the palm upturned and open. "Take my hand, MJ," he says gently. "Just take it. And that way we'll know where it is you want to be."

       I sit. I look at his hand. I look at him. I look at his hand again.

Slowly, so very slowly, I draw myself to my feet. I stand there, on the edge of the diving board, looking only at him, seeing only him. The love I had. The love I still could have, if only, if only I deserved it.

        "You're so full of light," I say softly, "It hurts me to look at you."

"Take it, MJ," he repeats, his voice wavering, barely above a whisper now. "Take my hand."

The blood in my body is starting to flow again; the great meltdown, the great thaw is starting, the end of the ice age. All I hear is the blood as it churns in my ears, roars like a waterfall; from somewhere far away, I think I hear someone yell something, but I don't know what, and I don't know if it's real or imagined.

       I take one step forward, and another. I don't know if I'm going to take his hand or not. I don't know if I love him or not. I don't know just where it is that I want to be. But I do step forward.

      An explosion. A sound so loud it echoes inside my skull, penetrates through to my bones, pounds its way inside my eardrums. Peter stares at me, screams: "NO! GOD, NO!"

      What is he so upset about? I wonder idly. And then I feel it. Something wet, warm, oozing down my neck, pooling in my collarbone. And a searing, a burning, spreading through my brain.

      I lift one shaking hand, press the palm against my neck; it comes away soaked with red.  
"Oh," I say. "Oh."

I turn my head, ever so gradually, to one side, look over my shoulder. Behind me, below me, on the other side of the pool, filling up that entire end of the room, men and women in black jackets, black caps, blue uniforms. All with guns. Rifles. Shotguns. Automatics.

      Behind me.

Eyepatch. Would've let me know.

I've been shot.

I've been shot in the head.

I step backwards. The world is swaying, spinning away. Peter's face. Mask. The eyes, huge and white.

      I'm lying in bed next to him as the sunlight pours through the curtains.

I'm bandaging his wounds, putting a compress on his blackened eye.

I'm eight years old, at my birthday party in the yard, and Mom is laughing in the sunshine.

I'm sitting on the couch next to Otto, my fingers drifting through his hair.

I'm on the catwalk. I'm striding down the catwalk, wearing something beautiful, being someone beautiful, as light erupts all around me, dazzling and brighter than the stars. The music is only for me, the lights are only for me, the applause, only for me.

      If I fall, it will only be into a pile of red glitter. Not blood. Just red glitter.

And as my gaze flings up towards the ceiling, and I see the green-jewel lights of the pool dancing across it; as I sail backwards through the air, over the edge of the board, tumbling weightlessly and eternally through space, only one thought remains to me, one single thought left behind as all the others leave my brain one by one and the pale green water explodes into the sky above me:

        You were right, Otto.

It really doesn't feel like anything.

**_==_**

**The sickness sets in before I even open my eyes. She is not back yet. **

**I sit up, immediately regret it; white spots flash behind my eyes, a wave of nausea seeps through me, my head is clamped in a vise, and my nose and jaw, encrusted with dried blood, beat a dull, steady rhythm of pain throughout my skull. It hurts to move a muscle, hurts to take a breath. I don't remember a single thing I did last night. Upon deeper reflection, I do seem to recall a vague and hazy memory involving Spider-Man; perhaps my amnesia is a blessing in disguise.**

**       I stagger downstairs, not even bothering to clean away the blood. Strong black coffee. That's what I need. One depressant counteracting the effects of another. **

**      I stumble into the kitchen, set the kettle to boil; automatically, my tentacle stretches into the living room, snaps on the television. The noise stabs into my head, makes me wince in fresh agony, but it's better than silence.**

**       The news. An anchorman, looking grave and serious, one finger pressed to the mike in his ear. "...On our top story, our Arizona correspondant, Diane Allison. Diane, what can you tell us?"**

**       ...Arizona? **

**I turn around, stare at the screen blankly.**

**"Well, David, although the police are attempting to keep things strictly under wraps for the moment, I _can_ confirm the initial report filed earlier this morning. The New York-based fashion model turned urban terrorist, Mary Jane Watson, has been gunned down by the Tucson police force operating in collusion with the US Marshalls..."**

**And**

**The whole world**

**Just**

**Stops.**


	9. Very Nearly Heaven

**__**

**_Freak Like Me_**

**__**

**_By_**

****

Santanico **__** **_Nine: Very Nearly Heaven_**

_All over New York. It rushes through the wires, sizzles down the lines, through tangled cables; over the rooftops and beaming out through television screens, through radios. Energy. Energy, taking form, shaping itself into the message:_

_ She is dead._

_Or, no, she is not. We're sorry. Our information was inaccurate. Mary Jane Watson is _not_ dead. _

_ Or, no, she is._

_Or, no, she isn't._

_Nobody knows anything._

_And their lack of information streams across the city, a babble of confused voices; so many channels, so many reporters, and no one knows what's going on._

_ And their voices rush across the blue skies and down the power lines, those lines that dip underground, past the concrete, past the dirt; those lifelines that connect to workplaces and homes all over the city. And one of those lines leads into a house in Queens. A house on Arbor Street._

**Thirty-five cigarettes. An ashtray, overflowing, on what used to be the coffee table. It is basically little more than splintered glass and a wooden frame now, but compared to the rest of the house, it is in positively pristine condition.**

** The banister is shattered, turned to woodchips, its forlorn remains collapsed by the side of the stairs, which are themselves pitted with holes. The walls have had huge chunks gouged away from them, the wallpaper shredded, hunks of plaster scattered all over the floor. The carpets have been torn up, the floorboards smashed. The hiss and gurgle of overflowing water whispers from the direction of the kitchen, where the plumbing fixtures are now little more than a twisted mass of copper piping, the faucets torn from the crumbling walls. **

** My upper tentacles helpfully light up my thirty-sixth cigarette and place it in my mouth; I inhale slowly as I lean forward, stare blankly at the television set. There won't be another news update for at least half an hour, but I won't look away. There might be a breaking bulletin. Some sign from above. Anything. Anything.**

** I can't even remember doing what I did to the house. It must have been shortly after that first news report. My mind switched off, then. Exploded into white noise. A great gap in time and space, and then I was standing in the middle of the living room, my breathing turned to great, ragged gasps, tentacles thrashing the air, in the middle of a destroyed house.**

** I fell to my hands and knees, unable to breathe for a time; another gap, and the next I recall, I was on my knees in the bathroom, vomiting uncontrollably into the bathtub, coughing and choking. It stopped, eventually, and I leaned my pounding head against the cool porcelain, and my mind was empty, everything in me, empty. I got up, and I washed out my mouth, and I cleaned the dried blood off my face, and I smashed my forehead into the mirror and cleaned _that_ up and swept the shards into the wastepaper basket, and I went downstairs and I opened the back door, and I leaned against the frame, staring into the garden; the sweat drying on my face was ice-cold, and the sky was a beautiful blue, and there was the softest breeze, and far away I could hear children playing.**

** And now I am here. Now. And I am calm. And it is my calm desire to raze this city to the ground, to rip out the buildings from their foundations, to snatch people off the streets and squeeze them and squeeze them until their internal organs mash like paste within my tentacles' grip. But I can't. I can't. Not yet. _Because nobody will tell me if she is alive or dead._**

** They won't even tell me where she is. These idiot news anchors, correspondents, so-called journalists, know nothing. One minute she is alive but injured, the next she is dead, the next she is alive again, and they are doing it on purpose, they are doing it to torture me, they are doing it because they enjoy worrying away at my heart like jackals with a piece of meat. **

** Mary Jane, Mary Jane. I don't know what you mean to me. But you mean something. And you cannot be dead. I can't lose another woman. Not again. And not you…**

** …You _bitch_. How could you do this to me? Why did you leave me, put yourself in harm's way? To spite me? To hurt me? You _can't_ hurt me. I am Otto Octavius, and you are just an experiment. Yes, yes, that's what you mean to me. An experiment. Nothing more. I don't care, I don't _care_ if you…**

** Just an experiment…**

**...And I hear you again, singing in the shower early in the morning, and I see you again, down in the basement, savagely attacking the punching-bag, and I feel you again, slumped against me, your head on my shoulder, the dim television light casting your features in flickering shadow, and a million other little things, tiny memories, those delicate slivers of life that are always the first to be forgotten - they pour back into my mind, tumbling, one over the other, a relentless and inescapable onslaught. **

** Am I being punished? I don't believe that there is a God. I never did. But if there is, then I want Him to know this: I will do anything, anything at all, for Mary Jane to be allowed to live. I will make any sacrifice, offer anything that is or is not mine to give. There is no extreme to which I will not go, no obstacle I will not surmount, in exchange for the fulfilment of one simple demand: that she be alive.**

** But if she is dead…**

**If she is dead, then nothing on Earth, no natural disaster, no man-made catastrophe, no plague, no pestilence, will compare to the vengeance that I shall wreak. I will devote my life to railing against You, against all You have created, all Your works in all their forms. The streets will be awash with the blood of the innocent; rotting bodies will swing from trees, from telegraph poles, from rooftops. I will murder Satan himself in order that I may replace him as Your nemesis. When people speak of Heaven's opposite number, they will be speaking entirely and solely of me. **

** If she is dead.**

**Mary Jane.**

**Where _are_ you?**

_And the power lines lead away from the house in Arbor Street; the black cables, impassive conduits of information, run deeper underground, stretch their thin electrical fingers out across the city at large._

_ They run beneath a mission-house near Harlem, give life to an old, static-ridden black-and-white television, stationed in a room with drab wallpaper, stained green carpeting, crucifixes and Desiderata on the walls. Sister Aileen Guiterrez sits on a bare wooden stool before this flickering light, staring at the picture of the immaculately-groomed news anchor. Under her breath she murmurs prayers; her fingers wind a rosary so hard across her knuckles that, later, she will discover the imprint of the beads still remaining upon her flesh. _

_ And the lines run further, further, across town, into a well-appointed living room in the middle of a slum. Chloe Miles perches on the edge of her stylish leather couch, and she cannot see, or hear, for the sound of her own sobbing._

_ The lines knot, entangle, come together, divide again; and in the offices of the Daily Bugle, still undergoing major repairs, it is they who power the computers the reporters tap away on; it is they who force the aged printing presses to lurch into life, spitting funereal black words upon clean, thin white paper. J. Jonah Jameson stands, grimly overseeing all of this, puffing silently upon a cigar, his face and manner set in stone. _

_ The lines stretch into the studio of Gerald Cordover, projecting their words and images upon an enormous plasma screen. Cordover sits a few meters away, at a table, arranging the portfolio he is to present to a client the next day; he is barely paying attention to the news, and when he does look up, he frowns, shakes his head, then quickly looks back down again. _

_ And the electric veins encircle the world, carry their messages into a luxury apartment in Paris, where Alessandra Georgiano, thoroughly enjoying her holiday, emits a loud "HA!" and pops the cork on a bottle of Chateau Lafitte to celebrate the destruction of her enemy. _

_ And so it goes. All those voices. All those reporters. All those bulletins and feature stories and late-breaking-reports. Piecing together the story of a girl's life, the story of what might be her death._

_ "…Watson's current location is undisclosed…"_

_"…Fears of reprisal from Doctor Octopus…"_

_"…Critical condition…"_

_"…Not expected to live…"_

_But it's all just energy, really. Nothing but energy, bright and clean and impassive. Energy, forever travelling down the lines, speeding off into the distance, bearing itself away, into the void._

It's all so quiet.

At first I can't see anything but a pale white blur. Can't feel anything but a yielding softness underneath me. And the quietness of it all; everything so hushed, so peaceful. Even the repetitive beeping sound that edges into my consciousness seems muted somehow. Like being submerged. Like being underwater…

And the awareness comes to me, all at once, that I am not alone. There is someone else here with me. Another presence, still and calm. The light shuffling sound of paper accompanies this knowledge; the sound of a page being turned.

My head weighs a thousand pounds, but somehow I manage to turn it to one side; beyond a blank expanse of white is a mish-mash of color, the only relief from the blanched state of the rest of the room. Pale green, black, purple, and sunlight-yellow. The colorful blur moves; turns another page, shifts slightly.

This presence is so familiar. Like an old friend. Like home.

I squint, blink, try anything to make my eyes focus. The lines drift in and out of my vision, forming, coming apart, re-forming. Eventually they begin to coalesce. A pair of shapely legs, booted up to the knee, crossed casually. A lilac miniskirt. A black turtleneck. Pale green coat. Purse slung over one shoulder. A lock of blonde hair, tucked behind one delicate ear. Black alice band, a dark stripe across the lowered top of her golden head. And the glimmer of cool blue as her eyes scan the pages of the magazine she rests on her lap.

I'm lying in a bed. In a white bed, with white sheets, and white pillows. And only a few inches away from where I rest my head, sitting in an uncomfortable-looking metal chair, reading a three-month-old gossip magazine, is Gwen Stacy.

Gwen Stacy the beautiful.

Gwen Stacy the untouchable.

Gwen Stacy the dead.

"Guhhhh…?" I croak, by way of enquiry.

"Huh," I think I hear Gwen mutter to herself as she flicks through the magazine, "I can't believe they gave _her_ her own talk show…Oh, hey," she says, looking up at me. "You're awake. Sort of."

"Go away," I groan, slumping down further into the bed. "I'm not in the mood for any more stupid dreams right now, okay? Just go back to whatever part of my psyche you came from and leave me alone."

Calmly, Gwen rolls up the magazine, and smacks me upside the head with it. A brief jolt of pain ricochets through my skull; I clutch the side of my head, wincing.

"_Aah!_ God! What the _hell _- ?"

"That feel like a dream?" Gwen asks, unfurling the magazine and tucking it under her arm.

I glare at her as I sit up, rubbing my head. "Was that completely necessary?"

"Frankly, sweetie, I felt it was." She takes one last cursory flip through the magazine, then, apparently satisfied that she's seen all there is to see, sets it down on the floor. Finally, she turns her full attention to me, folding her arms, leaning forward. "Anyway, you're not _actually _experiencing any pain. You just _think _you are, because you're so used to it."

"Oh, well, that explains everything, then." I look around, trying to absorb my surroundings; everything seems…off, somehow. Shimmering slightly. Imbued with its own inner light, luminescent, wavering. A world of will-o'-the-wisps. "Where the hell am I?"

"Don't remember? Oh, dear. Well, I'd sit back if I were you, hon, 'cause this might come as something of a shock."

Following her own suggestion, Gwen sits back in her chair.

"What kind of a shock?" I ask suspiciously.

"The not-good kind. Do you remember heading off to Arizona? Had some sort of wacky notion of knocking off your old man?"

Sand. Desert. Shattering glass. Faded wallpaper. I remember. "Yes."

"Okay." Gwen purses her lips, looks pensive a moment, then exhales loudly. "Well, there's really no point in dragging it out, I guess. You were shot. By the police." Pause. "In the head.

"You were shot in the head," she forges on, ignoring the way in which my eyes make a concerted effort to leap out of my skull, "And you fell off a diving board – don't ask – into a swimming pool. They fished you out, pumped your heart, bandaged you, stitched you, all that good stuff. The Arizona cops wanted to keep you in Tucson, but the US Marshalls had a warrant for your arrest and trial here in New York. So they moved you. Covertly, of course, and not to any of the public or private hospitals, since they don't want your eight-limbed lover-man to find out where you are."

"He's not my lover," I say vaguely, but my mouth seems to have suddenly been filled up with cotton wool.

"To make a long story short, you are currently in Westchester, being treated in the hospital wing of the Ravencroft Institute…"

"_Ravencroft!_" I squawk, sitting bolt upright. "_Raven_croft?! Jesus Christ! They've locked me away in the _nuthatch?_ With all the _crazies?!"_

"Yes, I just can't _imagine _why," Gwen says dryly. "Anyway, not only that, but you've also been in a coma for the last forty-eight hours. And are, in fact, still in it. Hence, my gracing you with my presence," she finishes blandly.

I guess I should be a little more surprised than I am. I should be frightened, at least, or worried, or something. But to tell you the truth, I'm just more than a little pissed off. "Wait a minute. Are you saying I'm, like, _dead?"_

"No, I'm saying you're, like, unconscious. No, I'm sorry, that was flip." She shakes her head. "Sorry. You're actually kind of sandwiched between the two states. Life and death, I mean. Hovering on the threshold."

"But I'm gonna live, right?"

She shrugs, looking slightly uncomfortable. "At the moment, it's a coin-toss, babe. It could go either way."

Part of my mind is spinning, a whirlwind of doubts, confusion, anxieties, memories drifting to the surface. But another part of me is calm, collected, willing to accept. Probably because there's no other choice. "Okay. Okay," I say slowly. "Well, we know where we stand, at least." I glance over at her, try to absorb her presence, try to comprehend who is here and what she is and why. "That just leaves you. How come you're here, anyway? Are you…you know…my guardian angel or something, now?"

Gwen rolls her eyes. "Yes. Because I've got nothing better to do with my afterlife than look after your sorry ass all the time. No, I'm not your guardian angel, MJ. I'm more like a guide. Someone familiar to help ease you into…whatever. Think of me as like Virgil to your Dante."

I snort. "Virgil to my Dante? Ethel to my Lucy, is more like it."

"Don't get cute," Gwen responds, though her lip curls in wry amusement.

"Sonny to my Cher?"

And she laughs. God. I'd forgotten how pretty Gwen was when she laughed. "In your dreams. I am, and always have been, Cher." She stands up, brushing her skirt down in the demure fashion I remember so well. "Ahhh. Well, cookie, what say we blow this popsicle stand? I don't know about you, but padded walls and hug-me jackets aren't exactly my style."

I stare at her dully. "You are kidding, of course."

Gwen quirks an eyebrow. "Nnnnoooo, I don't believe I was. Why? Did I say something funny?"

"Well, you know, Gwen, it's just a little bit difficult to get up and leave a hospital bed when one is, at present, in a _coma_," I say with heavy sarcasm. "Yes, I'm fairly certain there is a great degree of _difficulty_ associated with –"

"Oh, quit your whining and get up," Gwen slings back, folding her arms.

"I _can't_!" I whine.

"You're not even trying!"

"Because I know it's not possible."

"You're in a coma, yet you're _talking_. To _me_. Would you have said that was possible forty-eight hours ago?"

I pause. "No…"

Gwen holds out her hand. "Well, there you go, huh? C'mon. Let me take you away from all this."

I eye her hand a moment, wondering what it will feel like to grasp the hand of a dead woman. Will it be solid? Will mine pass through it like air? Will she disappear, vanish, leave me, if I touch her?

I reach out and grasp hold of her hand, my fingers closing around her wrist. She doesn't feel any different from the way she used to feel. When she used to seize my hand and drag me, running, yelling, laughing, down the street; when she used to hand me a lipstick or a mascara wand in the ladies' room; when I held her hands in mine as she hung her head and wept, the day of her father's funeral.

One touch. It can bring back just about everything.

She hauls me up and out of bed in one smooth motion; it's like being wrenched out of a trap, pulled free of a riptide that's sucking you down. I stagger a little, slightly dizzy, my body prickling with pins-and-needles. "God. I don't know if I'm ready for this whole 'standing' thing yet."

"Practise makes perfect." Gwen points behind me, back down at the bed. "Hey, check it out."

I turn, and there, lying in the bed I just left, is…me.

Thin plastic tubes connect me to blinking, beeping machinery; on my left side, on a screen, my life has been reduced to a long green line, stabbing upward in jagged peaks. My face is pale, shockingly pale, and the matted black hair that frames it only makes it look all the more funereal. A clean white bandage encircles my head, dips over one closed eye. My face is battered, bruised, pathetic. I never knew I could look so small. I never knew I could lie so still.

I don't know how to articulate any of what I'm feeling; it all seems to fade into the background as soon as I experience it, anyway, overwhelmed by a sensation of little more than mild curiosity. "Is that me?" I ask, because I want to ask a million other things and that's the only one that I can shape into words.

"None other," Gwen says, softly, standing a little behind me.

"I look horrible," I say, eventually, after a brief stretch of silence. "Really, really bad."

"Not as bad as all that," Gwen says, patting me on the shoulder. "I mean, considering."

I gaze down at myself a while longer, and something crawls into my mind, seeps in like a drugged mist; I stop questioning this situation, abandon all hope of anything ever really making sense again, or at least making sense in the way I'd thought it would. Total acceptance. Dream logic. Through the looking-glass.

I turn around, face Gwen Stacy, who is dead; I look her in the eye and calmly ask her: "Well. Now what?"

She seems to know that I have accepted this, accepted her, and she grins. "Now the _good _part begins." She gestures grandly towards the door. "After you."

I step forward, and find myself outside in the corridor.

The door did not open. I did not wrap my fingers around the knob and push forward. At one moment in time, I was in a hospital room; in this one, I am in the corridor. Nothing spectacular about it. Walked through a wall. These things happen.

The corridor is vast, echoing. The ceiling and the floor might well be reflections of each other; both are a shining, polished white. The smell of the hospital wing flickers in and out of my senses, that schizophrenic smell: disinfectant competing with infection, clean bandages versus metallic blood, health versus sickness and decay. And here, there's an extra spice added to the mix: the cool, pristine scent of sanity versus the sour, bitter odor of madness. It slithers down the halls, infects the air you breathe. You, not me. I have an immunity to it all now. A free pass. Get Out of Jail Free.

A shadow whips past me like a blowing leaf; another, and another, and another. This corridor is full of them, blips at the very edge of my vision; I catch them moving at the corner of my eye, then they're gone.

"What are those?" I ask Gwen.

Gwen smiles. "Honey, those are the living."

I stare at one, as it flickers and dies away. "How come I can't see them?"

"Well, it's a little complicated," Gwen says, sauntering down the corridor, linking arms with me in a companionable way I find unexpectedly comforting. "To distill a whole lot of quantum mechanics down into one or two easy sentences, we're moving at a different speed from them. In a different time zone. In a different time, place, space – oh, everything, really. To be honest, even after all this time, I don't pretend to understand it entirely myself."

I peer closer at the shadows that flit past us, consciously trying to slow myself down, to grab a glimpse of a face I know, to hear a whisper of conversation in a familiar voice – but it doesn't work, can't work, they're all moving too fast, moving beyond me. Or maybe I'm moving beyond them. Hard to tell.

And if any of these shadows that Gwen and I stalk past would've known me; if any of them would've had a soft word for me, a tender touch, even a sympathetic glance –

I guess I'll never know for sure.

_Peter looks up, blinks his tired eyes, a faint crease appearing between them. "Did you feel something just then?" he asks Gayle, sitting hunched on the chair beside his. "Something brush past?"_

_ "No," she responds tersely. Her whole body is knotted with tension, folded in upon itself to stop her from exploding. "Someone probably bumped against you or something. Jesus. Who cares?" She fumbles in her purse, produces a cigarette, lights it up._

_ "You're not supposed to smoke in here," Peter says automatically._

_She glares at him. "Try and stop me." She breathes the smoke outwards, seems to relax, if only incrementally. _

_ Peter gazes at her quietly for a few moments, watching the smoke encircle her head like a wreath, before deciding to chance speaking to her again. "Are you all right?" he asks tentatively._

_ Gayle breathes out hard through her nostrils, the smoke jetting out forcefully, before nodding, once. "Yeah," she whispers._

_ Peter looks down at the polished floor, at the murky reflection of the two of them visible in its surface. "Did you…Is your dad okay?"_

_ "Yeah. I called him. He's about as good as you'd expect."_

_Peter moistens his lips. "Did you…uh. Um. Did you let him know? About MJ?"_

_ Gayle shuts her eyes; her lips draw together tightly, into a thin line. "Yes. I let him know."_

_ "Is he gonna come see her?"_

_Gayle's reply is toneless. "No. No, he's not." She throws the cigarette to the floor, crushes it under the toe of her boot. "He doesn't want to see her. At all. I think his exact words were 'the little bitch tried to kill me, Gayle. She can rot for all I care'."_

_ Peter digs his fingers into his folded arms, bites down on the inside of his left cheek, anything to stop himself from letting Gayle know exactly what he thinks of her and MJ's father, anything to prevent himself from wishing he'd just gone ahead and let MJ kill him. Gayle's face, however, tells him that such thoughts would hardly be alien to her. She has made up her mind to forgive her father, Peter realises, but had not bargained on that being such a difficult proposition. So thankless, it is. Forgiving someone who doesn't even think he's done anything wrong. _

_ Silence reigns between the two of them; Peter, although so exhausted he can barely keep his head from nodding onto his chest, watches his wife's sister from the corners of his eyes. He tries to think, tries to focus his mind on something, even if it's stupid and trivial, like whether or not there's a family resemblance between Gayle and MJ, or if he should go down the hall for more coffee, or tallying up how many villains of his are currently locked away in the prison wing – but nothing seems to stick. The enormity of what has happened engulfs everything, shrouds it in a blanket of numbing gloom, renders the world colorless, soundless, motionless._

_ Maybe it's this place, too, he thinks, glancing around. Even though this is only Ravencroft's hospital wing – comparatively speaking, the safest place here – the urge to just get the hell out of here, to walk out into the whipping wind and pouring rain just for the sake of escape, is unbearably strong. Violence and madness, blood and pain; that's all there is here, all there'll ever be. Peter's spider-sense is practically screaming in his ears, beating at the sides of his skull; there's danger all around, caged only by padded walls, contained only by steel and bulletproof glass. If he listens closely enough, he can hear it, the chant of the mad, the moans and the giggles and the sounds that don't bear thinking about; they echo down the halls, even here, and the cacophony makes him want to rush into the room outside which he is stationed, snatch up MJ, and run for their lives._

_ Everyone here is crazy. Maybe MJ is too. Maybe he is. He certainly feels that he might be, or at least is on the verge. _'I'm mad, you're mad - we're all mad here', said the Cheshire Cat…

_ "Mr. Parker?" A gentle voice drags Peter back up from the dark depths of his imaginings, and he looks up blearily._

_ A tall, middle-aged woman, her hair the same slate-gray as her eyes, stands before him, hands buried deep in the pockets of her white coat. He takes this as a good sign. If there were bad news, she'd have her hands by her sides, or clasped together. He's grown so used to bad news over the years that he's come to recognise the signals._

_ "Yes?" he asks, his voice a tired rasp._

_The woman sits down beside him, perches delicately on the edge of the seat, as if to let him know she can't stay long. "And you must be Ms. Watson," she says to Gayle. "I'm Doctor Leslie Tate…"_

_ Gayle nods. "Any word about my sister?" she asks tensely, and Peter is almost relieved that she is the one who has asked first._

_ Tate sighs. "I'm afraid not. She still has yet to regain consciousness, and given the way her brain-waves are fluctuating at the moment, I'm unwilling to upgrade her condition from 'critical'. I'm very sorry I can't tell you any more…"_

_ Gayle breathes out sharply; Peter can't even bring himself to react any more. It's becoming exhausting, finding a fresh emotion for every disappointment. Tate, however, goes on. "But that isn't really what I came to discuss, exactly. Mr. Parker, Ms. Watson, between you and me, I do believe that Mary Jane's chances of survival are good. Fifty-fifty, at least. So I took the liberty of approaching Doctor Samson, the director here, with a proposal I feel would benefit Mary Jane greatly upon her recovery."_

_ Peter raises his head. "What do you mean?"_

_"I'm talking about a surgical procedure, Mr. Parker." Tate takes off her glasses, polishes them slowly on her lapel. "One that would benefit her not only physically but psychologically. She has been severely harmed, Mr. Parker, whether she realises it or not, and by undoing the physical damage, we not only minimise the risk of her endangering her own life, but may also help to ease her back into the life she led before this…unpleasantness…began."_

_ "Christ's sake. Just go on and spit it out, would you, Doc?" Gayle says, extremely irritably._

_ So Tate does._

_Peter stares at her in disbelief. "You can't be serious."_

_Tate looks back at him calmly. "I assure you, I am."_

_Peter looks away. "Huh. I guess what they say is true," he says, listening as his voice turns to ice. "You don't have to be crazy to work at Ravencroft – but it helps."_

_ "Mr. Parker," says Tate sternly, "I frankly don't care if you wish to cast aspersions on my sanity, but given that I must obtain your written permission in order to go ahead with this procedure, I'm afraid I must care about your opinion of my work."_

_ "I just can't believe you would want to go through with something like this now," Peter blusters. "You don't – you drag her off to this horrible place, you won't even tell me if she's gonna _live_ or not, and now you're sitting here trying to get me to agree to something – I – how do you know it won't kill her?" he demands, finally._

_ "I'm not saying there aren't risks involved," Tate replies. "We'll need to run some scans first, determine the extent of the damage. We don't even know for sure if it is fixable yet. But if it is…"_

_ She reaches out, presses Peter's hand between both of hers. They are soft and cool, and remind him of Aunt May. The doctor's eyes, when he lifts his head to look into them, are beseeching. "Mr. Parker, I truly, truly think that this would be for the best. I have nothing in mind apart from what I believe would help Mary Jane. I have worked at Ravencroft since its inception; I like to think that I have good instincts when it comes to aiding those who find themselves in possession of certain…unusual abilities, which they are psychologically ill-equipped to handle…"_

_Gayle snorts. "You mean, 'supervillains'. Right?"_

_Tate's eyes flash steel. "Some might call them that, yes. As I feel that it inappropriately glamorises mental instability, I personally prefer not to." She waves a hand. "But that's not relevant right now; the point is, Mr. Parker, Ms. Watson, that when Mary Jane awakes – and I do feel it is a question of when, not if – it should be our first priority to make her transition back to normal life as painless as is humanly possible, and this procedure is the first step towards that. It won't solve everything, of course, far from it – but it's a start. I cannot recommend strongly enough that you both sign the release forms. I promise you, in my personal supervision of the procedure, I will see to it that the best of care is taken."_

_ Gayle murmurs something inaudible, something that sounds vaguely like reluctant consent. Peter closes his eyes, pinches the skin between them with thumb and forefinger, trying to stave off an incipient headache. Everyone, it seems, wants the best for her now. While she was alive (conscious! Conscious! She's still alive, remember?), everyone just wanted to take her down, make sure she didn't hurt them. Get her before she got them. Now that she's down, they're all so deeply concerned with her welfare. Makes you want to cry. _

_ …Oh, the hell with it. He can't afford to be cynical now. Not with her life, and her sanity, hanging in the balance. Besides, it's not his style. There's got to be a little hope somewhere. Somehow. Otherwise, what else is there? How else is anything supposed to survive?_

_ "Where," he asks Dr. Tate, "Do we sign, exactly?"_

I don't know if I believe in ghosts (despite the fact that I'm currently walking beside what would appear to be one), but I definitely believe that houses can be haunted.

It's all about the energy. It lingers, like dust motes in sunlight, permeates the places where life became so charged, where emotion became so heightened, that even death couldn't make it go away.

Ravencroft is haunted by the ghosts of those still living. That's something I realise as Gwen and I wander further down the winding corridors, down shadowy stairs, into the heart of the place. The energy changes. Things get darker, wilder. You can feel the madness radiating off the walls, crawling across the high, vaulted ceiling, dripping poison across the floors. Even the lights grow dimmer here; the polished surfaces of the hospital wing give way to forbidding steel, grime, decay. The faint suggestion of industrialisation; this place is a giant processing plant for the hallucinating and the hopeless.

Life seems more real here than in the hospital wing. More up-front, closer. Barely held back. I can hear the inmates inside their cells – only the briefest snatches of sound, but more than I could make out before.

" – Can smell _girl _– "

" – Been gone long time, been gone – "

" – Listen to me, listen to me, I'm – "

" – Come home soon – "

Laughter. Sobbing. Shrieks. As soon as I comprehend a little of what I hear, it cuts out again, like listening to a car radio when you're going through a tunnel. Gwen, walking beside me, is strobe-lit in the interplay of shadows and dusky light, but from what I can make out of her facial expression, she doesn't seem especially concerned with any of this. That's Gwen. So cool, so collected. Not for the first time, I envy her.

Even though I know none of these people can hurt me – hell, none of them can even see me – I still want to get out of here as quickly as possible. The walls are too close, and getting closer, like steepling fingers; there's something of the rat-trap about this place, and all the rats stuck in here are trying as hard as they can to chew off their own limbs.

"My God, is this place a labyrinth or what?" declares Gwen, apparently unaware of my nervousness. "You could get lost in here for days and no one would ever find you."

"Oh, that's real comforting," I mutter.

Gwen laughs, bumps against my side playfully. "Aw, is oo scared of da big bad cwazy people? Buck up, little camper. I think we can find a shortcut if we – oh, hey, we can cut through here," she exclaims, reaching out and feeling the opposite wall. "It's just straight through this cell to the outside, and we're home free. Let's go for it."

" I – " I begin, but it's too late; Gwen has already grabbed my hand and pulled me forward.

The cell is filled with shadows and silence. There's a smell of dank, of mildew, and the faint sound of dripping water, skittering. There's only the faintest, most ghostly light illuminating the room, and that, I see, is coming from a television set in one corner. It lies on its side, smashed, the screen cobwebbed with broken glass, the image reduced to nothing more than wave upon wave of hissing static. There's a bed, spare and functional; a wash-basin, a chair bolted to the floor, a huddled heap of rags in the corner furthest away from the TV. The padded walls are covered in writing; I step closer to look at them, see illegible scrawlings mixed in with what look like scientific formulae. I lean a little closer, try to read them, press my hand to the wall.

The heap of rags explodes, leaps into the air, spins around and shrieks at me: "DON'T TOUCH THEM! DON'T EVER TOUCH THEM!"

I jump back as if I've just grabbed a live-wire; Gwen watches, unperturbed, arms folded, her only expression one of faint curiosity. The bundle of rags moves closer, slowly, slowly. I back up, partly out of fear, partly to avoid her sour, sweaty aroma; because it is a she, a woman, thin and wiry and corpse-pale. As she gets right up close to me, I see with a shock that she isn't that old, and must have once been pretty; she has, or had, an aristocratic face, high cheekbones, knife-sharp nose, catlike eyes a watery, faded blue, now practically black, swallowed up by the inklike dilation of the pupils. Dark hair hangs in oily strings around her shoulders, tangles in the small of her back. She seems vaguely familiar.

I glance over her shoulder at Gwen. "How come she can see me?" I demand. "And I can see her? Is she dead?"

"No, honey," Gwen says quietly. "She's just…operating on a different level from most other people. If you get my meaning."

The woman extends a skinny finger, tries to poke me in the chest; I don't feel it at all, don't even think it makes contact, but she doesn't seem to care. "You don't ever touch the walls," she hisses. "Not ever. That's when they get you. You listen closely, you can hear them. Behind the walls. But if you get too close they get you. And that's what they want. That's why I had to destroy the television."

"I'm…sorry?" I venture, uncomfortable.

The woman snorts, draws back, arms crossed defensively over her chest. "Going near the walls…" she mumbles. "It's just idiotic. You don't touch the _walls._ Everyone knows _that_. Otto knew that. But then, Otto knew everything…"

_Otto…_

I peer closer at the woman, my brow furrowed, trying to remember where I've seen her before, trying to pick out some sort of resemblance from the wreckage in front of me.

And then I see it. Then I know.

I've seen her before in cheap black-and-white newsprint. I've seen her before in grainy security-camera footage. I've seen her before on television, in glorious full-color, viciously attacking my husband, trying her damnedest to rip him limb from limb…

…With four…metal…tentacles.

"You're Carolyn Trainer," I whisper.

Her head snaps to one side; her empty eyes glare at me balefully.

"You were Otto's assistant. You _were_ Doctor Octopus while he was…" I trail off.

"Dead," she says flatly. "Dead. Like her." She gestures at Gwen, who seems to take no offense.

"But I, I, _I _brought him back," Carolyn says triumphantly. "Kiss of life. Only me. I was the only one who cared enough. Oh, except for _Stunner_," she spits the name out as if it tastes bad. "But she didn't _count_, not really. It was always Otto and me, me and Otto. I made her for him," she says suddenly, urgently, "Stunner. Did you know that? I designed her VR body, every inch of it, every hair, every molecule of flesh. I '_made love_'." She laughs shakily. "But it was okay. She wasn't really real. I knew that. I didn't care if he liked her better. Otto had his needs, and…You know, I didn't _care _about the things they…" She stops. She turns back to me, looks at me, eyes narrowed. "Come here, dear," she says distractedly, holds out her arms. "Let me look at you."

Hesitantly, I step forward. Carolyn gazes at me critically. "So," she says, a trace of sadness in her voice, more than a hint of resentment. "You're his new girl. Christ. You're young."

A silence. She seems to expect me to say something. "Um…Not that young," I volunteer. "Twenty-five."

She snorts again. "Young." She closes her eyes briefly, opens them up wide. "Where were you staying?"

"Huh?"

"With him. Where were you living?"

"Uh. In his house?"

Carolyn rears back like a striking snake. "His _house_," she says reverently. "He took you to his _house_? He never took _me_ to his house…Lots of lairs, though. Hideouts. Headquarters. All over the place. We went together, him and her and me. I got to stay downstairs and listen while he and that FAT COW," she suddenly screams at the top of her lungs, "Were SCREWING EACH OTHER! Ohhhhhh GodohGodohGod oh that WHORE, that SLUT, she would've been _nothingatall _without ME, _ohhhhhhhJeeeeeeesussss_…" Spit rains down from her lips onto the floor; she curls her fingers into claws, shreds her nails down her face, flesh ripping away, blood streaming in great rivers down her cheeks. "OttoILOVEYOU, OttoINEEDYOU, belong to you, belong to me, belong to you belong to me, belong – to – me - "

She descends into wordless shrieks; Gwen is completely silent, her head bowed; I cry out, press my hands to my mouth, I can't help it, it's so horrible, so horrible.

Finally, Carolyn slumps, panting, sweating, spent, against one of the walls; when she rolls herself over to look at me again, pale face still pressed against the wall, I can see that it is smeared with her blood. "You think you're different," she says to me, quite calmly. "But you're not different. I'm locked up in here, and Stunner is dead. You're going to wind up becoming one of us sooner or later." She smiles in a friendly fashion. "That's what it means to be Otto's girl."

She flips around, presses her back against the wall, sinks slowly down to the floor, wrapping her arms around herself. She runs her fingers over her arms, the motion obscenely sensual, crooning, "Otto loved me best. Me. Me. Otto loved _meeee bessssst_…"

A shudder passes all the way down my body. I can't take this any more. "Jesus Christ," I say, the revulsion constricting my throat, strangling my voice. "Can we just go?"

Gwen nods, not saying a word; she takes my arm, gently steers me around, and we walk out together, leaving whatever remains of Carolyn Trainer behind us.

The mood between us is sombre, even as we step out of the stifling asylum air into the fresh, rainswept winds outside. The sky is a glowering gray, and the grass under my feet is a soaking wet carpet. I shiver, though I don't feel cold; just shaky, I guess. The image of Trainer, tearing at herself that way, is painted across my mind and will not fade.

I glance sideways at Gwen; she seems to be making a studious effort not to look at me, fiddling with her purse.

"Was there any particular reason," I ask slowly, "Why you chose to take me through that woman's cell?"

"What gave you that idea?" Gwen asks vaguely, before pointing ahead, changing the subject. "Oh, wow. Would you just look at _that?"_

I look, and all thought of Carolyn Trainer and what she might mean to me disappears from my mind.

We're standing on the top of a vast hill, overlooking a stretch of open road. It'd be a fairly boring road, ordinarily, the only thing livening it up being the gaudy advertising signposts that run parallel to it; but right now, it may well be the most beautiful thing I've seen since…ever.

The road, the signposts, the telegraph wires are sparkling, crackling, glittering; every so often a spark flies, like a firecracker, into the rainy skies. Unimaginably long lines of white light stretch down the surface of the gravel road, shooting off into the distance. Everything below us is lit up. It's the Fourth of July, it's Las Vegas at midnight, it's Aurora Borealis charged and electrified.

"Oh, my God," I say softly, "It's so…"

"Mmm," Gwen smiles. "Pretty, huh? And you know, no matter how often I see it, I never quite get over just lovely it really is."

"What is it?" I ask.

"Energy, baby. All those power lines twisting together and converging. That's pure energy you're seeing now, speeding down those lines, lighting up the sky. Not many living people have ever seen this. You may be the first, for all I know."

I stare down, hypnotised, at the valley of light below. "So, you mean, those are TV and telephone signals? Things like that?"

"Among other things. Yes."

"So what we're looking at here," I say, more to myself, really, than to her, "Are other people's voices. Their images. Condensed into…energy."

Gwen smiles again. "Yeah. I guess you _could_ say that."

I shake my head. "It's amazing."

Gwen coughs, shoots me a sly little grin. "Do you want to see something else that's pretty amazing?"

I shrug. "Hit me."

Gwen lifts her hand, holds it up, palm upward, held flat; a fat raindrop lands right in its center, the first drop that has touched her so far. She pulls her fingers closed, into a fist, squeezes it tight, tighter, grimacing a little.

When she opens it, there, in the middle of her palm, lies a single, perfect, tear-shaped diamond.

"Oh, my God!" I exclaim again, laughing in delight, taking hold of her hand, staring at the jewel. "That is just so…" I search for words. _"Neat!"_

Gwen chuckles, plucks the diamond from her palm, holds it between the thumb and forefinger of her other hand. "It gets neater, kiddo. Why don't you take a closer look?"

So I do. I lean in closer, stare into the depths of the sparkling crystal; the light from the road beyond shimmers dully through it, filters through the kaleidoscopic facets. Maybe it's that light playing tricks on me, because, as I continue to gaze at the diamond, I seem to see movement inside it, a faint, tiny, dollhouse image growing clearer and clearer the longer I stare.

I want to ask Gwen about it, but for some reason the words won't come; nor can I look away. I don't want to look away. Some warm and strange rush of air is engulfing me, lulling me, making me drowsy, hypnotised. It's drawing me down, drawing me in. Everything around me seems to fade, to fold, to narrow, and the whole world becomes the diamond, the diamond is the whole world, and there are different sounds, faint at first but growing louder, blooming all around me; voices, clattering, the delicate clink of china, music. A warm breath of steam; the smell of fresh coffee.

The lighting is soft, subdued, kind on the eyes; it illuminates the '50s movie posters hanging, in worn frames, upon the dark oaken walls; casts gentle spotlights across the black-and-white parquet floor. The patrons, all young and fresh-scrubbed and alert, sit together, chatting animatedly, at little tables, at the long curved counter, in the cozy booths beside the enormous windows. In the corner, the jukebox stands, green and red and gold, a delicious candy-colored confection, lovingly polished; a silly, saccharine little tune, older than the clientele, plays at a civilised volume, sweet and sprightly. It's all exactly the way I remember it. Every last detail. The Coffee Bean. Our hangout. Our home-away-from-home. Our place.

"'_Oh, baby, I've told ev'ry lit-tle star,"_ Gwen sings along, doing a little two-step beside me. "'_Just how sweet I think you are - why haven't I told you?_'"

"Curiouser," I murmur, "And curiouser."

Gwen laughs, takes me by the hand and leads me across the room, over towards an empty booth. As we sit down, I glance out the window; it's dark outside, impenetrably dark. I can't see anything at all, can't even be sure if there is anything at all; all I can make out is the rain, spattering against the glass.

"Is this supposed to, like, Heaven or something?" I ask.

"No. But it's close enough," Gwen replies languidly, crossing her arms on the tabletop, leaning forward. "Impressed?"

"Uh, well...Not really, Gwen," I say uncertainly, looking around. "I mean, it just looks like the Coffee Bean."

Gwen arches an eyebrow. "What were you expecting? Clouds and harps and flights of angels singing thee to thy rest?"

"Well - kind of, yeah," I admit.

"Jeez. What an ego you have. Sorry if the afterlife didn't live up to your standards, Princess. And anyway, it's not like we're gonna roll out the red carpet for someone who's not even dead yet, so be thankful for what you've got." She snaps open her purse. "How does coffee sound?"

"I haven't got any money," I point out.

"My treat." She motions to the waitress, who arrives at our table within seconds. A huge woman, she is, unbelievably tall and muscular; a giantess, long blonde hair flowing down her back, massive frame squeezed into a red uniform. Her icy blue eyes are bored, and she rests her weight on one hip as she poises her pencil above her notepad. "Ready to order, girls?"

"Straight black for me," Gwen says. "Actually, why don't you bring us the whole pot? We're probably gonna be here a while. Black okay, MJ?"

"Uh, yeah," I say, staring at the waitress. "Black's fine." The name-tag, pinned precariously to her right breast, reads: ANGELINA.

"I…I don't know you, do I?" I ask her.

"Seriously doubt it, kid," 'Angelina' replies briskly, scribbling down the order, turning on her heel, and stalking off.

"You know, between your constantly scoring points off me and that waitress' lack of professional courtesy, I'm beginning to think you people on the other side have some serious attitude problems," I complain.

"Well, you'd know, wouldn't you, kitten," Gwen says off-handedly. "You haven't exactly been the poster-child for good behavior lately. Not only have you become a wanted criminal, not only have you attempted murder – of your own father, no less – but, honey. Throwing yourself at Doctor _Octopus? _God. I mean, he's not even _cute_, is he?"

I groan, slump down in my seat. "You saw that?"

"I saw that. Didn't like it, but I saw it. And, you know, MJ, lord knows we've had our differences, but please believe in my sincerity when I tell you that you can do _waaaay _better." Our coffee arrives, two cups and a shining metal pot; Gwen nods a thank-you, picks up her cup, blows gently at the rim, dispelling the steam. I pick up a spoon, aimlessly stir it in the black brew.

"Don't put him down," I say irritably. "Okay? Otto's done a lot for me."

Gwen raises both eyebrows. "Excuse me, honey? 'Done a lot for me'?" She shakes her head sadly. "Oh, baby. You really _are_ confused."

Her condescension, that familiar brand of subtle one-upmanship that permeated our friendship while she was alive, annoys me, makes me more defensive than I otherwise might be. "Actually, considering that I'm lying somewhere in a gunshot-induced coma, I'm feeling surprisingly chipper, thank you very much."

"I'm not trying to make fun of you." Gwen looks up; I am surprised to see genuine dismay in her eyes. "It just really makes me kind of sad, that's all. You really do think he's the only one left. The only one who cares."

I study my coffee intently. "He is," I say stonily. "Everyone else…They just –"

"- Threw you away," Gwen finishes. "Yeah. Heard it before." She takes a sip of her drink. "That's pretty much been your all-purpose excuse, hasn't it? Your _carte blanche_. The entire basis of that sense of entitlement you've been sporting for the last few months – well, really, deep down, you've actually been sporting it for years." She shakes her head again. "Vengeance is _not _an attractive look for you, honey."

"See, that's what I've been talking about," I say vehemently. "It's people like you and ideas like that – ideas about _attractiveness_, about how a woman should look and act in order for society to accept her as a valid human b – "

"Oh, hush," Gwen says, instantly mollifying me, her manner entirely calm as she adds sugar to her coffee. "Sweetheart, you can't fool me. I was a model, too, remember. And, yes, I'll be the first to admit it's a problematic business to be in, to say the very least. Lot of deeply screwed-up attitudes there. But that doesn't give you the right to take away anyone's livelihood; it doesn't give you – or Ock, for that matter, whom it is _so_ painfullyclear that you are parroting – the right to lecture and dictate to people how they ought to live their lives."

"Why not? They seem to feel free to do just that," I fire back, "So why shouldn't I retaliate? Why _not _fight back?"

"Because no one sees this as a war except you and him," Gwen explains patiently. "Besides, we all know this isn't really about any sort of social commentary you two might be trying to make. Ock didn't kidnap you, didn't turn you inside out, just because he wanted to prove some abstract point."

"Why, then?" I ask, curious despite myself.

"Because he's hurting. Because he's been hurting for a very, very long time, and he wanted to damage somebody else, so he wouldn't have to hurt alone. You know, for all his pretensions of self-sufficiency, that man practically embodies the phrase 'misery loves company'."

It's my turn to shake my head. "Otto did not 'damage' me, Gwen," I say firmly, folding my arms. "I don't care what anyone says. He didn't do anything wrong, not – not, you know, in the long run. I know things were…" I exhale. "Things were difficult at first. It was hard to get used to. But he did it for my own good."

"Ohhh, _I _see," Gwen says mildly, nodding, topping up her coffee. "For your own good. Of course. Huhn. That's an interesting phrase, isn't it?" she muses. "You know, I bet I can think of a few more. 'He doesn't mean it, he's just under a lot of stress'. 'He's always sorry afterwards'. 'Maybe I asked for it'. 'I walked into a door'…"

"Oh, knock it off, Gwen," I snap. "He's never hurt me like _that_."

"In what way does he _have_ to hurt you," Gwen replies, "Before you get the message?" She sets down the coffee, slides a hand across the table, presses it on top of mine. "He hurt you," she says simply, looking into my eyes. "He cut you open. He went inside of your body, and he did something to you that nobody should ever have done to them."

"Cut it out," I say, trying to draw back; but something in her eyes, some unseen strength in her hand, compels me to stay where I am.

"He _hurt _you," Gwen goes on. "And he's still the only one you can't bring yourself to blame. The only one you'll absolve of all responsibility."

"I can't – " I begin, but don't finish, don't end it with: _lose him, too_. I won't give her that satisfaction. She's wrong. That's all there is to it. Gwen's just wrong on this one. She doesn't…"You don't know him like I do," I end lamely.

"Do you know him that well?" Gwen asks, not a trace of mockery in her voice now. "I mean really, MJ? Because even when you were with him, it often looked to me as if you were alone."

I frown, stare out the window into the dark. "He didn't do anything bad to me," I say stubbornly.

"This is really hard for you, isn't it?" Gwen asks gently.

God, I hate you, Gwen. I hate you so much. I'd forgotten what an infinite capacity for hatred towards you I once had; death made a saint of you, in my eyes, in Peter's. But you won't get one over on me this time. No, not _this_ time.

I whip back around to face her, feel my eyes blazing in their sockets. "You wouldn't happen to have a little personal _bias_ here or anything, would you, Gwendy?" I hiss. "Something to do with the death of your father, maybe? Or, hell, maybe you just don't want me to be happy. I seem to recall you did everything in your power to wrest that away from me while you were hanging out on Earth."

"Please," Gwen says coolly, sitting back. "After you've crossed over, family-related grudges don't tend to mean a whole lot. As for my trying to take away your happiness…" A brief flicker of pain crosses her beautiful face, and she looks away. "We had a weird relationship," she eventually says, her voice subdued. "Didn't we? We called ourselves friends, but it seemed like every time we got together, we'd just fall into this kind of catty, jealous, Betty-and-Veronica idiocy. And…I regret that. I do."

"Pretty magnanimous of you to admit it now," I say frostily. "Particularly since we both know you won."

Gwen blinks. "Excuse me?"

"You _won_!" I snarl, throwing my hands up in the air; a couple of the patrons cast glances in our direction, but I don't care. "You got the grand prize! You got Peter Parker! Just like you got everything else you ever wanted. Hooray for Gwen Stacy! Hooray for the good girl! Hooray for the beauty queen of Manhattan!" I slump back down, wrap my arms around myself tightly.

"That's what you think?" Gwen asks, in a slightly wavering voice. "You think I _won?_"

I snort. "Don't play _that_ one with me, Sunshine. We both know that if you hadn't died, I wouldn't have even been a blip on Peter's radar. Well, now _I'm _special to someone. Now someone needs me, me, _only _me, and here you are, come back from the grave to tell me it's wrong. Well, you can just bite me, you spoiled, goody-two-shoes little prom queen – "

"That's enough," Gwen says, steely, her eyes hardening.

But it isn't enough, it will never be enough. I've been waiting years to say this, never thought I'd have the chance, and now I couldn't stop it if I tried. " – Because you _died_, okay? You had your shot and now it's over. You had the perfect little life while I just sat around and waited and waited for _my _perfect life to begin, and now yours is over, and mine is starting, and you can't _stand _that –"

Gwen slams the palm of her hand down upon the table. "_Enough_," she says, her voice deadly soft, cutting me off as instantly as would a shower of cold water. "You know, Mary Jane, you can think and say whatever you want about me. None of that matters to me any more. What sickens me here, what I _will not_ tolerate, are the lies. The deceptions. These little fairy-tales you spin yourself, desperately trying to convince yourself that they're true, that you can live in them. Just before you were shot, just before you wound up here, something broke down in you. Even if you don't want to remember it now, for the briefest of moments, the membrane was torn from your eyes and you saw things the way they were. You saw that you were miserable. You saw that, for all your rage and all your mindless destruction, nothing had really changed. You saw that Peter loved you, and still loves you, and will most likely always love you. And you were _beginning_ to see that _you _still love _him_."

A pause. "As for what you have with Otto…" Her voice lifts again, becomes casual, conversational once more. "You ever hear of something called a _folie a deux_, kitten? It's the niftiest thing. French, don'tcha know. Means 'the madness of two'. It's when two people – two lonely, screwed-up people who, together, could fill an Olympic stadium with their issues, and haven't the faintest idea what to do about them – when these two people band together and create a nice, new little world all their own, where the rules don't apply and the pain doesn't hurt. And because there's two of them, each sustains the other's illusions. They live inside each others' dreams. And they are doing unbelievable damage to themselves and each other, but if they know it, damned if they'll ever admit it. Do stop me when any of this starts to sound even slightly familiar, won't you?"

I stare at the tabletop, play with the silver coffee spoon, watch the light reflect off its curving surface. Anything other than having to look at her. Anything other than having to say the words that I feel bubbling to my lips.

"I can't hate him, Gwen," I say. "He's all I've got."

"He hurt you," Gwen says, her voice a whisper, grasping my hands in hers. "If you could just admit that…"

"No." I shake my head. "No. No."

"He hurt you," Gwen repeats.

_Blood. Bright light. Shining steel. Face leaning over me, mask, black hole eyes. White gloves dripping red. Something that squirms, black, shiny, clamped between tongs._

"No," I struggle, feeling myself going under. "No, it was to help me, it was for my…for my…"

"He hurt you." That constant sibilant murmur, not even coming from her any more, coming from inside my head.

"I…" I look down. "Oh, Gwen," I whisper. "Oh, Gwen. He…" I shut my eyes.

"He hurt me," I say, at last, at long last. It's as if the words are being prised loose, wrenched free, from a steel trap deep inside me. "He hurt me. I know that. I know. But, oh God, Gwen. I can't seem to hate him. Is there something wrong with me, that I can't hate him, even now?"

"No, angel," Gwen says with the breath of a sigh, leaning back, her fingertips still brushing mine. "Some things can never be simple, even when, from a distance, they look as if they should be. He _was_ there for you. He picked up the pieces of the thing he shattered. Helped you, in his way. All that nasty stuff inside you came up to the surface, and maybe it was high time it did." She shrugs. "There're more kinds of love in the universe than there are species on Earth, baby. I don't believe that any of it can be classified as being right or wrong. All I ask is that you see it for whatever it really is."

I open my eyes, keep staring at the table. After a moment, Gwen leans over, cups my chin in her fingers, tilts my head up, smiles at me.

"Hey," she says softly. "I know you're sad. It wouldn't be raining outside if you weren't. But you should know, this isn't a sad time, honey. It has been, for a long time, but we're at the beginning of something new."

I shake my head, pull away, massaging my eyelids with one hand. "I wish I could believe you, Gwen. I really want to." I breathe out slowly, leaning my forehead on my fist. "I don't want to wind up like Carolyn Trainer," I mutter, without really knowing why. "I don't want to wind up without any hope."

"You never will," Gwen says. Then: "Huh. Looks like we're out of coffee. What say I order us some more, hey?"

I open my eyes, lean back in my chair, watch her for a while; she doesn't object. "Yeah," I say eventually. "Yeah. That'd be great."

"Great," she echoes, and leans out of the booth, raising an arm and calling to the waitress.

I turn my head to gaze out the steam-misted window, out at the rain. Something churns inside me, some emotion, but nothing I can identify. I feel tired, run down, worn out. Idly, I wonder what, if anything, lies beyond that black fog, beyond that endless downpour.

I feel deeply sorry for any poor soul out there who might be trapped in it.

**There is a bitter wind tonight, cold and angry. It bites my face, claws at my exposed flesh, but I don't feel it at all, not at all. There is nothing left in me that would be able to feel it. My whole body is scar tissue.**

** I scale the tops of the buildings, the city a dark, dim mass beneath me. Exhaustion dogs my every step, enfolds me in shadowy wings, but I cannot stop, I will not stop. Until I find her. Alive, dead, it makes no difference - I just have to see, to know for sure. I know I promised myself that I would wait, wait for some kind of definitive news of her, but nothing materialised, no miracle arrived. So I left.**

** I had to leave. Had to leave that house. I'm not sure if I will ever go back. The longer I stayed, the louder the silence became, the more it began to speak to me; there was giggling under the floorboards, whispering behind the wallpaper. Mary Jane, my talisman, no longer there to ward away the evil spirits.**

** I cannot go home without her. There is no longer any home without her.**

**Every hospital in New York City. Every last one, public and private, pristine and quiet, run-down and echoing with tubercular coughs - I have been to them all tonight. She is nowhere, vanished off the face of the earth. Sirens scream below me, too late, meaningless. Vaguely, I wonder why the wall-crawler has not seen fit to intervene this evening; I almost wish that he would, just so that I would have someone to break, someone to hurt. **

** The last hospital I visited, the general one, large, white, clean. Echoing corridors, down which stampeded panicking patients, shrieking staff. The floor was littered with what remained of the wall, now reduced to rubble; nothing but bricks and mortar. I barely even remember going in, but I do remember the head of staff on his knees before me, sobbing, a tentacle pinioning his arms behind his back, another encircling his torso, slowly crushing his rib-cage, a steel anaconda. A middle-aged man, he was, bald and bearded. Comfortable. Unused to such pain.**

** "I will ask you again," I growled. "Where is she? And if you dare ask me who I mean," I added, "I will kill you within the instant."**

** "I swear to God," he moaned, "I don't know. She's not here. I don't know where she is. I don't know I don't know I - "**

** "Is she dead?" I demanded. "Is that it? Is that why you won't tell me?" A note of hysteria was creeping into my voice. I noticed it, did nothing to stop it.**

** "No!" he cried. "I mean I don't know! I don't know! They haven't told anyone where they're keeping her, because - because - "**

** "Because they don't want me to find out," I finished grimly. "Because they 'fear reprisal'." I laughed, shortly, unsteadily. "Or so the news informs us. Yes." I looked back down at him, at the top of his head, bowed as if under a terrible weight, shuddering every time he emitted a fresh sob. "But this is the last hospital in town. I have been to all the others; she is not there. Therefore, by simple process of elimination, she must be here. Correct?"**

** "No," he wept, "No. No. I swear. She isn't here. I don't know where she is. I really don't know. I swear I'd tell you, I swear, but I don't, I don't, I don't know."**

** I believed him. He really didn't know. That much was obvious. But it felt wonderful to break both of his legs anyway. Felt wonderful to hear him scream.**

** The feeling did not last for very long.**

**And now, here I am, wandering, aimless, blinded, over the rooftops. I am empty, empty of everything; hollowed out, devoid of life, moving as an automaton would. Moving, because one has to keep moving. In order to escape. You taught me that, Mary Jane.**

** When I get you back, I will punish you, make no mistake. If I can make you feel even one-tenth of the pain that you have put me through, it will be enough. I will make you sorry, sorry that you ever left me, sorry that you were ever born; I will make you weep and beg and crawl. I will bind you to me, remind you who made you, to whom you belong. I will force you to lick clean the wounds that you have inflicted upon me.**

** I'll take care of you. I'll look after you. You must be injured, you must be suffering, lonely, afraid. Come back to me. Come back to me and I will make you the happiest woman who ever lived. Every day will be the best day of your life. I will make you forget all about that fool you married. I will make you forget about everything, everything that exists outside the two of us.**

** Would you have stayed if I had made love to you? If, that night, that wretched night when the whole world changed, I had ignored your tears, the way any real man would have, the way my father would have; if I had stripped you bare, held you, naked in my arms, and drowned myself in your flesh; if I had made you rake your nails down my back, if I had made you scream my name and tell me how much you wanted me, how I was your one desire; if I had made you mine, and mine alone - would that have made all the difference, Mary Jane? Would you still be here? **

** I wish I had done that. I wish I had done everything to you, with you, while I still could. Lust, bitter as cyanide, rages through my veins even thinking about it, even now. It warms me, makes me feel less alone. Closer to you. You kept touching me. Wanted to be closer to me.**

** You needed me once. Why didn't you need me any more? (_I_ don't need _you_. I will never need you. I mean it. Just an experiment. This is not real pain. This doesn't really hurt.) You went away, and they hurt you, maimed you (killed you) (no), and now you are far from me. You are gone. You are gone. (Come back) (I'll kill you I'll) (Come back)**

** I slip down the side of a building, into the darkest alleyway I can find. It is here that I huddle, my arms crossed, my fists clenched, my eyes shut. I have no desire to see the world any more, nor for it to see me.**

****

** I am bleeding, bleeding to death.**

**I will never find you.**

**Everything hurts.**

_The room is dark, silent but for the incessant beeping of machinery. She lies, a sleeping beauty, swathed in hospital linens and white bandages. Beyond thought, beyond pain._

_ Beyond hearing, when the door opens, and the doctors troop in, single file, anonymous beneath green scrubs and masks. The squeak of wheels, as they roll in the steel trolleys laden down with equipment – syringes and scalpels, winking in the dim light._

_ Tate is the last to enter, shutting the door behind her, heading over to the sink in the corner to wash her hands._

_ "Still don't know if this is a good idea," mutters one of the junior doctors. _

_"What was that, Frank?" Tate asks sharply._

_Frank swallows, as all the other surgeons look his way. One does not incur the wrath of Leslie Tate, particularly not prior to major surgery. "I just, uh…I just said, I wasn't sure if this was a good idea. She's still not out of the woods yet from the gunshot wound. She's delicate. Even if she were in perfect health, this would be a big risk…"_

_ "You saw the X-rays. Correct?" Her voice is clipped._

_"Yeah…"_

_"Then you clearly saw," Tate continues, "That the damage Octavius inflicted upon her spinal column was, in fact, reversible. Not easily reversible, but reversible nevertheless. Correct?"_

_ "Yes," Frank says, looking as shamefaced as one can from behind a surgical mask._

_ "Then there shouldn't be a problem. Should there?" Leslie snaps on her gloves. "Ladies and gentlemen," she says in a lecturing tone, "I did not reach my position at this institution by sheer virtue of luck. I know precisely what I am doing, and I trust you do, too. I also know that there are times when one cannot afford to be timid in the operating room, and that this is one of them." She lowers her gray eyes, glares at the assembled surgeons from beneath dark, determined brows. "In short: I want this damn thing out of her spine, and I want it out today." She ties on her hospital mask._

_ "Turn her onto her stomach," she commands two interns, who move to obey. "And – I cannot stress this enough – be _careful _with her. Remember, we're still not entirely certain what we're dealing with, when it comes to this one."_

"…_Out of her spine…today…onto her stomach…careful_…"

The voice echoes off the wooden ceiling over our booth, brisk, female, faintly reverberating. I look up, frowning.

"Did you hear that?" I ask Gwen.

"Hear what?" she asks vaguely, sifting through the contents of her purse.

"I thought I heard someone…" I shake my head. "Never mind. Probably my imagination."

"Probably," Gwen agrees, then: "Ah! Found you!" Triumphantly, she places a deck of cards upon the table, worn with use, bound with a black ribbon.

"What's that?" I ask, as she slides the ribbon off. "I'm not sure if gambling is really permitted this close to the Great Beyond, Gwen."

"Oh, very droll. No, these aren't playing cards, MJ. They're tarot cards." She starts to shuffle them.

I laugh out loud. I can't help myself. "You've got to be kidding me! You don't really _believe_ in that fortune-telling crap, do you? I suppose next you're gonna bust out the Magic Eight-Ball."

The corner of Gwen's lip curls derisively. "You're sitting in a coffee shop conjured out of a diamond, in a booth across from a chick you know perfectly well has been dead for over half a decade, and yet your suspension of disbelief draws the line at _tarot cards?_"

I consider it. "Huh. _Touche_." I watch her shuffle the cards a while longer, before my curiosity gets the better of me: "Uhm…So. What are you gonna ask?"

Gwen grins. "You mean, am I gonna ask anything about _you_, right?"

"Oh, well…" Caught out, I shrug exaggeratedly, roll my eyes to the ceiling, scratch my neck. "I mean, y'know, just, if you're asking _anyway_…"

"It's all right, kiddo, I'll spare your pride." Gwen splits the cards into three, then regroups them. "What do you want to know?"

I don't know. I don't know if I want to know anything. I want to know everything, and nothing, all at the same time. A million questions. How is Peter? How is Otto? Should I give a damn about either of them? Will my father ever become anything approaching a decent human being? Is Gayle mad at me? Is everyone mad at me? Should I just cut myself adrift and stay here, in this warm place, with my lost friend, forever? Is there a way back, or a way out? Am I as evil and desperate and doomed as the voices that have lived in my heart since childhood keep chanting that I am? Is there anything beautiful left in life at all?

"What's going on?" I hear myself ask, kind of faintly. "That's what I'd like to know, Gwen. Just what the hell is going _on_."

Gwen gazes at me through those shimmering, impenetrable eyes, shuffles the deck once more, and begins to deal the cards. She sets the first one down: a tall, austere tower, a column of white, around which rages flashing lightning and insurmountable blackness.

"You've been looking," she begins, staring down at them, "In all the wrong places. Deep down, you think the darkest places in the world are the only ones where you can find yourself. Basically, babe, you've been wallowing, and you've been hating yourself, and you've been liking it."

Makes sense. "Go on."

She deals out another card; a skeletal rider on a pale horse. "Oh, fantastic," I say heavily, folding my arms. "The Death card. Well, now I feel just super."

"Oh, stop it. It doesn't actually mean literal death. It means change, something you can certainly use." Another card; she sets it down onto the surface of the table with a soft slap.

"Family," she says. "A woman a little older than you, and a much older man. There's pain here. But then, you knew that." She scans the card, lays down another one. "Your sister still loves you. You thought she never did, and right now she doesn't really want to, but she does. It's just very hard for her; something closed off in her a long time ago, and she's afraid to show it to anyone ever again. And, yes, that's got a lot to do with the old guy."

Gwen's face darkens. "He's _never_ gonna change, MJ. You have to realise that. But you've got to accept it, too. The scars won't ever heal, I know. But you can't keep tearing the wounds open over and over again in the hope that the pain will lessen this time. Your dad is going to go to his grave never acknowledging the damage he's done, not even to himself, but you don't have to let him keep hurting you forever…"

I shut my eyes briefly, open them only to stare at some point over her right shoulder. "I know," I say quietly. "I know, Gwen. Keep going."

Gwen watches me for a moment or two, then turns back to her task, sets down two more cards.

"Two men," she muses. "No prizes for guessing who _they_ are. One of them has done wrong, screwed up badly, and he knows it. He's been tearing himself half to pieces because of it. But the difference between him and the other guy is, he isn't going to throw himself into the abyss. He isn't running on anger or fear. This guy, underneath it all, likes himself. And it's because of that that he's capable of loving you." Something flickers in her eyes; she blinks it away, sets down another card, heaves a sigh.

"But the other guy…" She sits back, rubbing her chin. "Yeah. Now _he's _a different story. Bad juju here, kiddo. Black aura. Empty space. He wants you because he thinks you make him a better man."

"And do I?" I enquire sardonically.

"No. He just makes you a worse woman." Another card; another expression flashes through her eyes, and, though I might be wrong, it looks to me like something approaching alarm. "Bad juju…" she repeats softly, shaking her head, before looking up at me intently. "How much attention have you ever paid to that phrase, 'it's always darkest before the dawn'?"

"Uh. Not much?"

Gwen bites her lip. "You might want to try and keep it in mind from now on."

And maybe it's the look on her face, or the way the wind outside suddenly picks up, beating itself against the fragile glass of the window, or maybe my nerves are just more tightly-wound than I thought – whatever it is, I shiver. Something cold ensnares me, catches me upon its claws; I've got no logical reason for it, and I can't explain it.

But all of a sudden, I'm terribly afraid.

And that's when the pain begins.

_The mask, gently pumping a sedative gas, is lowered over the young woman's mouth and nose, just beneath her closed eyelids. It hardly seems necessary, given that she has not recovered consciousness since her arrival, but even in the course of an operation as strange as this, some standards must be adhered to._

_ Sweat beads on Dr. Tate's brow; she hastily wipes it away with the back of her sleeve. The patient has been fully prepped. Everything is ready. All that remains now is to keep a cool head and a steady hand._

_ "Scalpel," she says tersely, holding out an expectant hand; the instrument, wickedly sharp, gleaming, is placed in her palm._

_ Without hesitation, she leans forward, and makes the primary incision._

It catches me right in the middle of my spine, shoots up the ladder of the vertebrae into my cerebral cortex; it strikes deep into my pain centres, burrows into my brain. I gasp as it sears me, wracks me; something is being torn away, torn out of me. I slam my palms onto the surface of the table, unable to catch my breath, all of it forced out of my lungs. "Gwen," I croak, "Gwen, help – "

I fall sideways out of the booth, onto the floor; for an instant I am blinded with agony, seeing nothing but bursts of white on black, but Gwen is beside me, grasping my hands tightly in hers, urgently saying something like _it's all right, it's all right._ She doesn't ask me what's wrong. Maybe she knows. If she does, I damn well wish she'd tell me, because worse than the pain is the fear.

It's like giving birth again. Like the labor contractions, the spasms, shooting like fireworks up my body and into my mind, taking me over, invading my system. A child being taken out of my body, being cut out of me and –

Oh God.

Oh God no.

"_No!_ _Brenda!_" I shriek; Gwen says something, but the rushing in my head won't let me hear her. I shove her away from me, reach up, out of the pain and through it; I seize hold of the table's edge, haul myself, somehow, to my feet.

They're taking her away from me. My tentacle. My baby. My Brenda. Just like Baby May was taken. They're going to take her from me. They're going to let her die.

I haul off from the edge of the table, run, half-crippled with the pain, across the wide parquet floor, towards the door marked EXIT, at the other end of the shop, so far away.

"_Jesus Christ, no!"_ I hear Gwen holler, and her frantic footsteps beat, relentless, behind me; I can't look back, can't even speak, can't see anything except the door ahead of me, can't think of anything except Brenda, my darling, my baby, I'll save you, I'll save you –

- My hand is on the doorknob –

_And the girl's eyes snap wide open; a wordless, animal moan grinds out from her esophagus._

_ The room erupts in chaos._

_"Crap! She's awake! She's _awake!"

_"Put her under!" shouts Tate. "Put her under NOW!"_

_Frank hurries to the girl's side, oxygen mask in hand; and just as he reaches her, the tentacle shoots upward, an independent entity, enraged, flailing wildly. Its claws are open; it smacks him across the face, shattering the bones in his nose, sending him flying backwards. _

_ "Ahn! Gob! Bmy nose!" he blubbers through a mouthful of blood._

_"Get him out of here!" thunders Tate; an intern grabs Frank by the arm, drags him out. Another one, burly and muscular, seizes hold of the tentacle, forces it down, into a restraint. _

_ "Doctor, she's flatlining!" yelps one of the nurses, pointing at the screen; a long green vein slithers across it, unblinking, emitting a high, monotonous whining sound._

_"Charge up the paddles!" cries Tate, snatching them up. "Clear!"_

_She presses them to the girl's chest; her body leaps into the air, arches; a brief spike onscreen, lapsing back into a straight line._

My whole body shudders, as if someone's just grabbed me and shaken me, but I can't pay attention to it; Brenda needs me, my baby needs me, my little girl –

I fling the door open; outside is nothing but darkness, nothing but a howling void of wind and rain –

_ "She's going into shock," mutters an intern. "We're losing her!"_

_"Clear!" yells Tate, slamming the paddles back down onto the girl's breastbone._

_Another jolt; another spike; another long, long line._

Gwen practically tackles me, seizing me around the waist and hauling me back with one arm, slamming the door closed with the other, pulling me down to the ground. I scream, buck, lunge towards the door, but Gwen has me in an anaconda's grip, my arms locked behind my back, leaning on me with all her weight. "It's_ not _your baby, MJ!" she bellows. "It's not your baby! Let it go! Let it _go_!"

"Get the hell _off_ me!" I jabber, desperately trying to shove her off. "Brenda, my baby, my baby, my baby, she's mine, she's Otto's and mine, ours, they'll kill her they'll kill her baby my baby my – "

Gwen slaps me smartly across the face; it's the shock of it, not the sting, that startles me into a flood of tears. All the strength, all the will to resist, leaves my body like a breath; I collapse there on the floor, my forehead pressed to the tiles, knees tucked under my belly, as everything pours out of me, as every loss, every suppressed grief, every swallowed rage, is drowned in a torrent of salt water. Gwen kneels beside me, hugs me, rocking back and forth, stroking my back, my hair, with such infinite tenderness that it only makes me cry harder. "You're okay, you're okay. You're okay, you're okay," she murmurs, an incantation, a magic spell.

I pull my arms free, wrap them around her. I am holding on for dear life.

_The girl's eyes flutter closed again; the spike onscreen catches, picks up, settles into a steady rhythm._

_ "Stabilising, Doctor," says an intern._

_Tate breathes again. "Great." She wipes her forehead again, exhales, and picks up the scalpel once more._

_ "Administer some more sedative, Nurse. Make sure this woman is_ completely _unconscious. I never want anything like this to happen again, are we clear?"_

_ Sheepish mumbles of assent._

_"Good. Forceps."_

We sit there for a good long while, silent, until the tears finally ebb away, the sobs die down into shaking, then stillness. "You wanna get up now?" Gwen asks softly. I nod; she takes my arm, helps me to my feet, starts to lead me back to our booth. The other patrons stare as we pass; Gwen glares at them. "Problem?" she asks sarcastically; one by one, they all turn back to their coffee; the jukebox even starts to play again, something more subdued this time. Billie Holiday, I think. Peter likes her a lot.

"Oh, God," I say. "Oh, God." I breathe out. "They didn't even ask me." My fists clench, almost convulsively. "They didn't even _ask _me."

"How _could_ they, hon?" Gwen asks reasonably, passing me a napkin. I dry my face, blow my nose.

"I'm sorry," I mumble.

"For what?"

"Just, going nuts like that." I laugh, still a little tearful. "Wow. Things change, huh? I remember, back in the day, you were the one who used to cry in front of people. I never could."

"I don't really have very much to cry about these days," Gwen says quietly.

I sniffle. "That must be nice."

Gwen is very still, her face like the surface of a pond, calm and clear, could be easily shattered at any moment. "Not as nice as you'd think."

I sniff again, brush at my eyes with the napkin. "You're so…I dunno. So serene. So together. Nothing seems to really bother you." A desperation seizes me, prompts me to ask, my voice a plea: "Why do I have to be me? Why can't I be you, Gwen Stacy?"

Gwen looks back at me. "Because I'm _dead_, honey," she says, simply, sadly.

A heartbeat of silence; the music insinuates itself between us, mournful, a pain-filled lament. "_Soon there'll be candles and prayers that are said, I know; let them not weep, let them know that I'm glad to go_…"

"These old songs…" I say. I shake my head. "I keep getting so…drawn towards them. Why is that, Gwen? What is it I'm hearing whenever I listen to them?"

"Yesterday," she says quietly. Then, looking out the window: "This is an interesting song, you know. 'Gloomy Sunday'. People called it the Suicide Song. After it hit the air-waves back in the thirties, all these people started killing themselves. The police kept finding this song on their turntables. 'Gloomy Sunday', over and over. I guess none of them paid any attention to the last verse, where it turns out to all be a dream. For some people, I think, their own pain can be so intense that they can't see the way things really are. Can't see what life is actually trying to tell them…"

More silence; then she leans forward, brushes the remnants of my tears away from my face with her thumb. She offers me a tiny smile. "You look a mess.. Let's go get you cleaned up, huh?"

She takes me by the hand, leads me over to the Ladies' Room door, pushes it open.

We step into a long, low-ceilinged corridor, lined, floor to ceiling, with mirrors; my image turns a thousand times, stretching away into infinity, an endless field of doppelgangers. "I don't remember the way to the Coffee Bean Ladies' Room having all these mirrors," I remark. "Or being at the end of such a long hall."

"Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown," Gwen rejoinders, shoving her hands into her pockets and sauntering off. I join her, walk side by side, matching her step for step.

It seems somehow imperative that I do this. Because, even though we're walking at the exact same pace right now, I have this feeling that I'm about to leave her behind.

_Peter and Gayle sit together in the hospital corridor, and it seems that they have been there forever, fixtures in this terrible place. They ran out of things to say to each other long ago; pleasant, casual chatter would be impossible, but then, so would the opposite. Even scratching the surface of what they feel would be to draw blood._

_ Peter's eyes are closed, and his head flung over the back of the chair; he looks asleep, should be asleep, but he isn't. He doesn't think he'll ever sleep again; his brain is lit up like a Christmas tree, throbbing and pulsing and whirling, yet oddly dull, oddly sluggish, at the same time. There's a sense of weariness: it's happening _again_, this loss of someone he loves; he wonders briefly if it's actually possible to grow desensitised to these things, develop an immunity to grief. _

_ She was right on the verge. Right on the knife's-edge of returning to him. She would have taken his hand, he knows it, and everything would have been good again. _

_ Gayle, for her part, is thinking nothing at all. An old trick, one she learned very long ago, when a belt was descending towards her and her skin was set on fire; a total blanking-out, a vacating of the senses. But it's a balancing act, a high-wire stunt; it requires infinite concentration. One slip, and it's all over. You cannot even allow yourself hope; the plummet from that is so much steeper than it is from anything else._

_ The door creaks; Peter's eyelids are heavy as cinder blocks, but he opens them anyway. Gayle is already sitting up, her whole body a twisted nerve._

_ Dr. Tate is standing before them, shucking her latex gloves, and Peter tries desperately hard not to gape at the blood that coats them, Mary Jane's blood. He stares up at Tate mutely, unable to speak, to ask._

_ Tate smiles._

_A gasp escapes Peter's body, and he becomes aware of something wet rolling down his face. Wrong reaction, he thinks dimly; she's smiling, there shouldn't be any tears, not now, but they won't stop; neither will the smile on his own face, the one he only realises is there when it starts to hurt his facial muscles._

_ "Oh, God," he whispers, doubling over in his seat, his hands pressed to his face, "Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you…"_

_ "Doctor?" Gayle cuts in sharply; she cannot accept anything this nebulous, must have it confirmed in words. "Mary Jane. Tell me…" Her voice chokes off, fails entirely. _

_ Tate, still smiling, sits down beside them. "The operation was a complete success, Ms. Watson. I won't lie to you; there were a couple of scary moments, but we got them under control. Her condition, overall, has stabilised; she's currently sedated, but we believe she will regain consciousness within the next hour or so."_

_ "And – there isn't any – damage?" Gayle asks hesitantly._

_"Nothing permanent. The bullet didn't go in, didn't hit bone. Personally, I suspect much of her condition was due to shock. Which, Mr. Parker," she says, turning to him, "Is something you may have to watch out for when she awakes. This is going to be a very difficult time for her."_

_ Peter nods. When he speaks again, his voice is controlled, slightly strained. "And what about the…that thing. That he put there?" Quiet loathing. "The…tentacle. Is it gone? Did you destroy it?"_

_ Tate sighs, looks down at her hands. "Believe me, Mr. Parker, I would like nothing better than feed that thing into the nearest garbage disposal. Unfortunately, I have been informed that it is considered evidence in Mary Jane's upcoming trial, and is therefore to be turned over to the police as soon as possible."_

_ "I want to see it." His voice is hard, harsh, too loud._

_Tate lifts an eyebrow. "I'm not sure if that would be –"_

_ "I need to see it." _

_ Tate breathes out, scans Peter's face. Something in it seems to persuade her; she gets up, goes back into the room, returns holding a metal pan in both hands._

_ Peter stands up, takes the pan, stares grimly into its depths._

_It lies, limp, motionless, the inanimate object that it is. An amputated thing; the sliced-off tail of a reptile. Even its black surface seems to have lost its lustre; it doesn't look intimidating any more, doesn't look like a weapon. It just looks pathetic. Abandoned. Useless._

_ Peter knows just how irrational this is, but he hates it, this object, this _thing_. The longer he stares at it, the more he feels the hatred grow; finally, with a grunt of disgust, he pushes it back into Tate's hands, looking away. "Get it away from us," he says, in low tones. "All of us."_

_ Tate nods. "I will, Mr. Parker. We'll put it in storage straight away." A pause, and then, gently, "Would you like to see her?"_

_ Peter looks up, meeting Tate's sympathetic gray gaze with wide, trembling eyes. "I…Of course. Yes. Of course I would." He swallows, glances over at Gayle. "Gayle?"_

_ Gayle has been sitting, rigid, the whole time, her back perfectly straight, her hands folded in her lap. She looks as if she has been a million miles away; at the sound of her name, she snaps back to reality. "Yes?"_

_ Peter nods towards the door. "We can go see her now. Do you – I mean, if you want to…"_

_ Gayle looks down, sharply, at the floor. "I…" She presses her lips together. Then: "No. I'm sorry, no. I don't think I can…No, Peter. I'm really sorry. I can't."_

_ Quickly, she gathers up her bag, slings it over her shoulder, stands up. Her eyes meet Peter's, and behind the sheen of ice that seems to be a permanent fixture within them, Peter thinks he detects a discordant, jangled note of anguish. "Make sure she's okay," she says abruptly, and, dipping forward, she briefly, unexpectedly hugs him, before turning and stalking away. _

_ Peter watches her go, this proud and wounded woman; he wonders if he'll ever really figure out what makes her tick, wonders if he'll ever see her again. The thought doesn't linger; he turns back to Tate, says, "I'll see her now."_

_ Tate nods, opens the door. "I have to go inform my superiors of the operation's outcome. I think you ought to know, the room is being monitored. Cameras, you know. Just – to be on the safe side. In case she becomes…"_

_ "Villainous?" Peter doesn't mean to be sarcastic, but it slips out anyway. _

_"Something like that," Tate says crisply. "She has been restrained, and I very much doubt she'll try anything anyway, but if something does go wrong, don't hesitate to ring Security. The button's near the light switch."_

_ "Thanks, but I think I can handle it." Peter moves into the doorframe, stands against the light. He can smell disinfectant, freshly changed linen, a vague scent of flowers. In the darkened room, he can see her only in shadow; the pallor of her face alone serves to guide him towards her. He moves over the threshold, quietly shuts the door behind him, unable to tear his eyes away from the sleeping woman. She looks like hell. She's so beautiful._

_ He crosses the room, sits down in the chair beside her bed. She looks so fragile, like porcelain. He's almost afraid to touch her. When he does reach out and grasps her hand, it is so light, pulsing so steadily with warmth, that it feels like grasping a star._

_ The steady beep of the machines. The regular rhythm of her breathing. Peter wants to stay here, to be here when she wakes, to watch her until her eyes open; but his own are drifting shut, the barrier of anxiety in his mind dissolving. She is going to live. She is going to be all right. If she will let him, he is going to help her be all right. Everything is fine._

_ Finally, Peter Parker sleeps._

"It's so weird," I find myself saying, staring curiously at Gwen's profile, studying it, as if I'm trying to commit it to memory. "Now that I think about it…"

"What is, hon?"

"You were the best friend I ever had."

Gwen's eyes fall to the mirrored floor, watch her reflection.

"Isn't that funny? And kind of sad?" I go on, turning my gaze ahead. "While you were alive, I spent more time hating you and wanting to be you than I did being a friend to you. But now, here, after everything that's happened, I realise that you were actually my best friend. Nobody came along to replace you." I laugh hoarsely. "And it seems like all I ever did while you were around, all either of us ever did, was try to outdo each other, for the sake of a man. A man who, I don't even know if he was _worth_ it…" I trail off.

Gwen brushes a lock of blonde hair back from her shoulders. "He screwed up, babe. He said the wrong thing at the wrong time. Let it go."

I shake my head. "It's not just him. It's all of them. I can't forgive that; I can't forget the way they – "

"Damn it, MJ." Gwen's voice is harsh. "Has nothing I've said gotten through to you? When are you going to realise that it's not about _them_, it's about _you?_ Don't you think you've punished everyone – them, Peter, yourself – enough by now? Aren't you _tired?"_

"More than you'd believe," I say quietly. Then: "I missed you. I thought of you, that night, out on the street, after Chloe threw me out." I pause. "I mean it, you know. I did want to be you. While you were alive. So badly, I wanted to be you. Even when your dad died, I envied you. Even your pain looked better than my…numbness."

Gwen sighs, stops, turns to me. Her eyes plumb the depths of mine, searching, seeking, unutterably sad. "Do you _still _want to be me, MJ?"

"Yes," I say, without thinking, though even as I say it, I know it's true. "Yes, I do."

Her breath hisses out from between her teeth; her eyes narrow, and she turns sharply to face forward. "MJ…I lost out, okay? I drew the short straw. It didn't happen for me like – " She waves a hand, taking in the space around us " – Like this. It was cold and bitter and ugly. It was fast. So fast I never had even a moment's choice. I had my decision snatched away from me."

She shuts her eyes. "God. Everyone thinks that what happens after you die – that it's so great and wonderful and so much _better _than anything that happens while you're alive. But the truth is, when you die, you…stop. Everything stops. Nothing _ever _changes, least of all you. I mean, look at me." She gestures to herself, utters an unhappy laugh. "I'm gonna be twenty years old forever. I'm never gonna be old. Do you realise that? Never grow old. Never grow up. It's…it's Never-Neverland here, MJ, in a funny way. First star to the right…"

She breathes out, crossing her arms over her chest, staring up at the ceiling. "Oh, damn," she says. "MJ, just keep trying, won't you? One of us has got to. Learn to save yourself. Be your own superhero. I mean, there are just so many wonderful things in life, you know? There's – there's rain, and there's food, and there's the smell of burning leaves, and there's the way the lights in Manhattan shine off the wet pavement, and there's old people sitting out on the street on hot summer days, and it's all so _amazing!_ It's all so _beautiful!"_

We walk a little further. "You know what I always liked?" I finally say. "Those roasted chestnuts you could buy from the vendors in Times Square around Christmas. God, they were great."

Gwen looks at me; a smile touches her lips. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. And you know what else? That perfume that Aunt May always wears. It's…" I giggle, surprising myself. "It's such a little-old-lady kind of flowery cologne thing, you know? You feel safe just as soon as you smell it."

Gwen laughs. "Yeah, I remember that."

"And those stupid songs Peter likes to sing when he thinks I can't hear him!"

"Oh, oh, oh – you mean - ?"

"_Always look on the bright si-ide of life_…" we burst into simultaneous song, and almost fall over beneath the weight of our laughter.

Gwen is the first to recover, sighing happily. "Ahhh. Well. Here we are, I guess," she says, as we approach a nondescript white door; she reaches out, pushes it open.

There's no Ladies' Room beyond this door. No sinks, no stalls, no more mirrors. Instead, there's a bed, where a girl lies, doll-like, swathed in bandages, black hair spilling across the pillow, her arms joined up to blinking machines. A steel chair, bolted to the floor; a shadow flickers in this chair, like the image on a broken television set. Every so often, the shadow coalesces into something recognisable; a lock of dark hair falling across a closed pair of long-lashed eyes; lips, parted in sleep; rumpled clothing encasing a wiry, slumped form; a hand, grasping that of the girl, as if it will never let go.

We're standing in the doorway of my hospital room. I am looking in at myself, and, fast asleep in the chair beside me, Peter.

"How come I can see him?" I whisper; it isn't necessary to do so, but it feels as if it is. The room is so hushed, so still, as if the entire world has gathered around it to watch in silence.

"Power of love, baby," shrugs Gwen. "Well, you know, that and you're beginning to regain consciousness. But, y'know – the love thing, too."

I stare at myself, at Peter, whose image is growing stronger, stabilising for longer periods of time, the more I continue to watch. "So…this is it? For you and me, I mean?"

"I'd say so." Gwen's voice has grown strangely rough, slightly broken. I turn to her; she seems faded somehow, all her bright color draining away, like the last traces of a sunset. Even her eyes, the color of the sky, are growing darker.

"What are the odds that I'm going to remember any of this when I wake up?" I ask.

Gwen shrugs. "Well, remembering stuff from this plane is kind of a tricky business. Only those who are _very_ highly spiritually evolved can do it…"

"Ah. So what you're saying is – "

"Snowball's chance in Hell, yeah. Still…" She smiles. "Fun while it lasted, hey?"

"Yeah. I…Yeah." I look at her, at Gwen Stacy, my best friend, for what I know will be the last time in this life. I wish I knew what to say, wish I could conjure the right words. But all I can manage is: "Thanks for the coffee."

Gwen laughs. "No problem, honey. Just try and do me one favor when you wake up, will you?"

"Name it."

"For God's sake, get rid of that awful black dye job. You look like every fifteen-year-old who ever bought a Switchblade Symphony album."

It's my turn to laugh. "Will do."

The smile fades from Gwen's face, the face that is, itself, beginning to fade before my eyes. She moves a step closer, takes me by the shoulders, looks deep into my eyes.

"You are what you are," she says softly. "And what you are, is not bad. Not bad at all."

She leans forward, and places a kiss on my forehead. It is the lightest of kisses, barely more than a delicate breath of air, but I feel it spread through my system, tingling through my limbs, sluicing through my veins like warm water. There is something in it of my mother, of sultry Summer days and revivifying Spring, of the change in seasons, of all the love I have ever known, all the love in all the world.

It is this kiss I take with me as the fall of light begins to change, as the air grows thicker, as the pulse of the universe starts to quicken; it is this kiss, and nothing else, that I carry back with me as I finally break the surface.

It's dark. Dark, and warm.

I can feel myself smiling before I even open my eyes; I don't know why. What is this delicious feeling running all through me, this quiet joy? What new world, new life, is this?

A white-painted ceiling swims into view, dim and hazy in the half-light; slowly, I tilt my gaze down, drinking in the walls, the nightstand, the machinery to which I am tethered. I see it all with only one eye; the other is covered with a film of white gauze. Somehow, I know I ought to be surprised to find myself here; ought to be disoriented, even panicky. My wrists are tied down at my sides, secured by restraints. I'm in a whole world of trouble; I know that, too. Some terrible acts have been committed; terrible things have been afoot, and may still be. _Bad juju_, I think to myself, the phrase popping into my head out of the blue.

Peter is by my side. His head rests on the edge of my bed, only barely touching me; his hand is clasped around mine. His face is turned away from me, but I don't need to see his face to know it's him – that touch would be enough to identify him even if I had been struck blind.

"Hi," I say, my voice a croak, before I can even pause to think what else to say to him. There's so much. Too much. A world of words.

He mumbles something incoherent, and begins to stir. He sits up, blinking wearily; dark shadows wax beneath his eyes, and even as he turns to gaze at me, it is clear the cobwebs of sleep haven't cleared from his mind yet.

"Don't I get a 'welcome back', Tiger?" I ask faintly.

His eyes open wide, and his mouth falls open, the corners lifting into a smile so radiant it could light up the night. "MJ," he whispers, practically leaping forward to embrace me, a reflex action, before remembering at the last minute and pulling back, settling instead for a tight squeeze of my hand. Nervous. Unsure. Doesn't know how I'll react. Smart cookie, Petey. "Oh…welcome back. Welcome back. How are you feeling?" He notices my smile. "I'm guessing, fairly cheerful, from the looks of things."

"Yeah." I feel my smile broaden. "You know, yeah, actually, I really am. I just feel…" I laugh, only a little, only softly; too much motion makes my head ache. "…I just feel really _happy_, you know? I don't know why. Just…happy. Peaceful, I guess you'd call it. Sort of blissed out."

"That would be the painkillers," Peter says, but in a pleased tone of voice nevertheless. It is swiftly replaced by his more familiar worried look, as he rushes into a struggling clarification. "You know where you are, right? I mean, you know why you're here. You're in a hospital bed – I mean, well, you're in the hospital wing of this place, it's – well, you were shot by the police down in Arizona, because you went there to –"

"My Dad. Yes. I remember that much," I say, surprising myself with my own sense of calm. It's not the dead kind of calm, though, that I've been feeling off-and-on for the last few months. Not that numbness. It's more a kind of acceptance. It doesn't feel too bad.

It seems to unnerve Peter, though; I can't blame him for that. "Right. And, yeah, they brought you back to New York, though not the city – they couldn't put you in a regular hospital, because they're afraid…they're afraid _he'll _come looking for you, so they put you in here, but don't worry, don't worry, it's only temporary, you haven't been committed or – "

"Committed? That doesn't sound too good."

He swallows. "Well, the fact is, they put you in Ravencroft. The, uh. The psychiatric institute."

"The crazy house."

He looks down. "Yeah. The crazy house." He exhales. "I'm really sorry, MJ. I fought tooth and nail to get them to change their minds, put you somewhere other than this awful place, but they wouldn't listen…"

"It's okay, Pete." Amazing; nothing he's said so far has surprised me in the slightest. Those painkillers really _must_ work.

He looks up at me; the last few months' pain and worry are etched deeply into his face, criss-crossing it like scars. "'Pete'? You just called me 'Pete'."

I gaze back at him. "I guess I did."

Peter is silent for a very long time. I notice he has not let go of my hand yet; I don't think he even realises that he's still holding onto it. I don't mind, to be honest. I meant to take his hand earlier, so this is just making up for lost time.

"MJ," he begins; his eyes drift shut for a moment, as he rallies all his strength behind what he is about to say next. When the words come, they are controlled, forced out from within the depths of his soul, falling one by one like drops of heart's blood. "For the last few months, I've been trying to think of reasons why I love you. I even sat down at one point, at the kitchen table, and I actually tried to make a list – Pros and Cons, neat black line drawn down the middle of the paper. I must've sat there for hours, with the pen in my hand, just staring at the sheet, before I screwed it up into a ball and threw it away. You see, it's just not possible to ask myself what my reason is to love you, MJ. Because it's like asking myself what my reason is to breathe."

"Peter…" I start, though I have no idea what I plan on saying. It doesn't matter, anyway, because Peter holds up a hand.

"Please, MJ. Just, please, let me finish. If I had to put into words a reason why I love you, then I guess it would be because you're beautiful."

My heart sinks. Oh, God, Peter. Have you really learned nothing from this?

"Beautiful," he continues, "Because that's the only word – the only stupid, inadequate word – I can think of to describe it. If I never gave you a compliment that didn't revolve around your beauty, it was because you never were anything other than beautiful to me. And it never had a _thing _to do with your face, or your body. You would be the most beautiful woman on Earth if you weren't anything other than a brain in a jar." Pause. "Well, that's a less than romantic image, admittedly, but you see my point."

I close my eyes. "What you said to me," I say dully. "What you said to me, when I came to you, when I was hurt and frightened…"

Behind my eyelids' darkness, I hear him breathe out. "There's nothing I can say to make that all right, is there? Saying I was in shock, or it came out the wrong way…it all sounds so weak and spineless. So, no excuses. I was wrong. I was a total, total idiot. I blew it. Maybe I've still blown it. That's up to you. But…"

I open my eyes again; Peter has hung his head, and I can't tell if those are tears running down his face or not. Too dark to know for sure. "…If you remember what I said to you on the diving board…know that I meant every word of it. I love you. You don't have to be with me if you don't want to, but I do love you. I'd take you back, in any condition, after you'd walked across any kind of fire. I only hope there's even a chance you could do the same for me."

I am quiet, taking all this in. I do remember what was said on the diving board. I remember what I said. I told him he was full of light, and it hurt me to look at him.

It doesn't hurt me any more.

"I haven't let go of your hand yet, have I?" I say.

Peter's eyes shoot up to meet mine. More silence, nothing but mechanical beeping. Is brow furrows, and he looks away again. "MJ," he says abruptly, "Can I ask you something? And don't think it means – don't think I'm – _insinuating_ anything, or…"

"G'head, Peter." I settle back into the pillows.

He swallows, cannot look me in the eye. "It's about – you. And Doc Ock. I – Did you and ever…become…involved?" Every word strangles itself out of his throat, burying itself in his heart like a snake's fangs. I can tell. I know him.

"And, and, please, don't think it means I don't trust you," he rushes on, not apparently noticing that I haven't taken offense, "Or that it would change anything I've said, because it won't. I won't – do anything. It's just, you hear things, rumors, and even though you don't believe them, it's hard, and – I just want to know the truth," he finishes lamely.

About me. And Doc Ock. I cast my eyes down to the white bedspread, wait for the words to come. "There was a point," I say carefully, walking over the most fragile of glass, "When I could have. When things between him and me became…complicated." (They still are.) "But I couldn't. I couldn't do it. And at the time, I really didn't know why."

Peter watches me closely. "But you know why now?" he asks softly.

I look back up at him. Our hands, still joined, still connected. After all this time. "Yeah," I say. "I think I do."

The door opens; a nurse steps inside, hesitantly. "Oh!" she says, seeing me, "You're awake at last. How do you feel?"

I shrug. "I'm all right." It's the first time in months – in years – that I've been able to say that with any real sincerity.

"That's good. No pain?" she asks briskly, scribbling notes on my chart.

"Well, my head aches a little. So does my back, come to think of it."

The nurse darts a glance over at Peter, who looks nervous all over again. "Uh…MJ, while you were knocked out, the head surgeon here thought it would be best if – " He seems to gather strength, and plunges ahead: "MJ, the tentacle's gone. We had it taken out. They're holding it for your trial later on – "

(Trial. That's right. There _will _be a trial, won't there?)

" – But it's not a part of you any more. It never really was. And now it's gone." He waits, tense, for my response to this.

"Hm." I say, eventually. "Good."

Relief seeps into every line on his face, banishes the anxiety.

The nurse gives a discreet little cough. "Uh, Mr. Parker, sir? Dr. Tate sent me to tell you that Ms. Watson needs her rest, and that she feels it would be best if you allowed her some alone."

"But – " Peter starts to protest, but I cut him off.

"It's okay, Peter. I am actually kind of tired. It'll be fine." I offer him a smile. "I'm a big girl."

"I just –" Peter lowers his voice. "I just don't want to leave you alone in this place. Heck, _I _wouldn't want to be left alone in this place."

"We will take the best care of her," interjects the nurse, having overheard despite Peter's best efforts. "I promise you, nothing will happen."

"Really, Pete," I say, stifling a yawn. "I think it'd be best. You go on home. You must've been here long enough. What time is it, anyway?"

"Late. Really late. Or early, I guess, depending on how you look at it." Peter checks his watch. "If I catch the bus to NYC now, I can make it back by dawn." He looks at me. "Is it okay with you? If I go? I swear I'll be back as soon as I can…"

"Go," I say. "Get some sleep. You look awful. A total train-wreck."

He grins. "It's a little too early in the morning for flattery."

I smile. It's a weak joke, but it feels good to be able to smile again, and mean it.

His grip on my hand slackens, reluctantly, and lets go; I feel its warmth, slightly moist, still imprinted upon my skin. He gets up, walks across the room, seems to suddenly notice the television set installed in one corner of the ceiling, and points to it. "Hey. You want me to turn this on? Just, you know…so you won't feel alone or anything?"

I start to say no, then stop; it's clear, from the eager look on his face, that he just wants to be able to do _something_ for me. "Sure," I say. "Just keep it down low, okay?"

He flips the set on; the screen crackles into life, light spilling across the floor, the soft murmur of an infomercial invading my ears. Should be able to sleep through it.

Peter opens the door, stands, softly silhouetted, against the harsh hospital light; I can tell he longs to kiss me, but doesn't dare, still cautious, resolved to take it slow. "I'll see you soon, then," he says faintly.

"Soon," I echo. He gives me one last look, and then is gone.

The nurse plumps my pillow, slips the remote control into my tethered hand, pats me comfortingly on the knee, and slips out. Save for the low babble of the TV, I am alone again.

I lie back, breathe out. I haven't even bothered to test my restraints yet; I don't feel any particular need to escape from them. Hell, if I were part of the Ravencroft staff, I'd want to restrain me, too. I think back, flip over the last handful of weeks and days as if leafing through the pages of a picture book, which is exactly where it all seems as if it had taken place. I know, though, that that's only because I haven't let myself think about any of it too deeply. Thoughts skim the surface of my mind, linger there a moment and melt away, not truly sinking in.

Peter and I. I and Peter. Us. There is an 'us' again, now, and it feels both deeply strange and perfectly normal, when I allow myself to contemplate it. Peter, and his voice, and his scent, and his eyes; Peter, back in my life. Me, back in my life. Or placed into yet another new one; I've gone through so many lately, a snake shedding multiple skins. Maybe this time, the scales have fallen away to reveal the real me. For the first time ever, I actually feel certain that there _is_ a real me.

Peter is wrong about one thing, though. When he said that the tentacle – Brenda – was never really a part of me. Of course it was. It was as much a part of me as my hands, my eyes, my heart. It was as much a part of me as the darkness that fuelled me, the pain that drove me and lashed me and spurred me onward. It was as much a part of me as…

Otto.

**My hair hangs in unwashed, filthy strings around my face, shielding me from the sight of the world. Whenever I pause to brush the strands away from my face, my hand brushes rough, prickly stubble. My stomach growls. My head aches. I can't remember how long I've wandered these streets, can't remember how long it's been since last I showered, shaved, slept, ate. Can't remember how long it's been since I was last home. If I was ever at home.**

** I walk along these deserted, ghost-swept streets, no light in my path but the murky haze of the lamp-posts. I don't care if anyone sees me; civilian or police officer, it makes no difference. Some force of gravity is pulling me down, by the head, by the shoulders; I walk as slowly as a man condemned. I am burned out, yet burning still. When will it be morning? This night has lasted forever.**

** I pass convenience stores, lit up from within with a harsh fluorescent glow; bars, smoky, sealed off from view; pornographic movie theaters, ugly and garish, pouring red and pink neon across the pavement. All signs of life. But the whole world is dead. **

** The only living soul I encounter in the course of my wanderings is an old drunk, buried beneath a pile of soiled newspapers, in the shelter of an alleyway. He is unconscious of my presence, singing, in a raucous, slurring voice: "…_Angels have no thought of ever returning you; would they be angry if I thought of joining you? Gloomy Sunday_…"**

** The sound of his voice, ringing down the empty, trash-strewn street like a bell, makes me shiver, for no reason I can account for.**

** I don't realise that I am passing the electronics store, the one with the multiple television sets on display in the window, until I overhear her name.**

** My head jerks up as if attached to a wire, spins to stare; two strides, and I slam up against the window, my breath fogging the glass. My hands tremble so that I must press them against the window-pane, just to keep them steady. My tentacles, underneath my coat, writhe and thrash like maddened snakes. My heart is on fire, its white-hot flame devouring my nerve-endings.**

** The news anchor, his image repeated a dozen times on a dozen screens, is intoning the news, speaking her name. "…Have been informed by insiders at the facility that Watson has, this morning, regained consciousness and is in stable condition. The urban terrorist, who had been shot down by Arizona officials after an attempt…"**

** I hear nothing else, nothing at all; the aching in my head is gone, the fatigue is gone, all the worry and all the madness and all the burning, gone, gone, gone. I'm not certain, but I think I cry out; I clap a hand over my mouth, my body shudders, my muscles melt, such is the weight of this joy, this relief, this release from my pain.**

**My tentacles rise up, swirl around me, wrap themselves around my body, as if to contain me. Everything is returning to life; with the coming dawn, comes such a rebirth, such a revelation: she is alive, she is alive and she is well, she is still mine, still mine after all.**

** My joy, however, is short-lived. After the first bright flare, it dies down, like a skyrocket falling to Earth. Clarity is returning to my mind. The rage steals back in, a thief in the night, taking my happiness with it. The television is still displaying images of her, her with her husband, the Parker boy; still revealing nothing of her whereabouts; still withholding her.**

** As I continue to watch, it all becomes so clear. All of it.**

**You never wanted to leave me, Mary Jane, my Mary Jane, my own. You never really wanted to go. And what happened to you was a terrible accident, a miscalculation. You should not have left, that is true, should not have left me alone; but I forgive you. **

** Now the veil is lifted from my eyes. I see the truth of the situation; I see the way things really are. **

**They are keeping you from me.**

**They are trying to take you away from me. They want you for themselves, these animals, these vermin. They want to confuse you, in order that they may claim you. They are holding you prisoner. They want to make you _beautiful_ again. **

** Your husband. He whose visage makes my stomach burn with nausea; that overgrown adolescent, that petty, shallow, spineless, unworthy _child_. He wants to force you back into your old skin, force you to see the world through his eyes, feel what he feels, love what he loves. **

** You must be insane with worry, desperate to return to me. My poor girl, my poor Mary Jane. But don't despair. There is a way out of this trap they have set for you, for us. They will not steal you away from me. _He _will not steal you away from me. If I cannot come to you, then I will arrange matters so that you may come to me. And you _will_ come to me.**

** For are you not my girl?**

**And am I not your man?**

_The sky is still dark, but veins of red and gold are creeping across its face, as Peter arrives back in the city._

_ The bus ride went past so quickly; he thought for sure he'd sleep a little on the ride home, but no, not a wink. He has no desire to sleep any more, no need, even though he staggers a little as he steps down onto the pavement. He may as well be on painkillers himself; he is certain that, if he were to look at himself in a mirror, he would see himself glowing, radiating with happiness. He has to forcibly remind himself, walking down the street towards the apartment – their apartment, as it was, as it is again, now – that things are still far from perfect. There's the trial to deal with. MJ could, probably will, go to jail. And she's still so fragile; there's every chance that this peace, this cease-fire, will not last, that something could happen to make her…_

_ Peter chastises himself, stops these thoughts in their tracks. Can't think that way. Can't try to anticipate what might happen. What matters is what has happened, what is happening, and that is simply this: MJ wants to try again. Not just with him, but with everything. With life. And that's all he needs to – _

_ A faint tingling, needles prickling along his scalp, down his spine: spider-sense. Peter whips around, scans the twilit street, sees nothing. A faint siren sound in the distance. The streetlights starting to blink out. All is still, all is silent. _

_ Probably just bad nerves or something, Peter thinks, letting himself into the apartment block, sidling into the elevator. Lack of sleep, imagination playing weird tricks. Hypochondria? Spiderchondria? Huh. He really must be tired._

_ The click of the lock, and he's back inside, back home. The living room is bathed in dark blue light, the couch, coffee table, TV set, casting thick shadows over the carpet. Outside the window, the faint twittering of awakening birds. The sky is beginning to catch fire._

_Peter collapses onto the couch, sighing, closing his eyes, feeling his focus drift, his senses beginning to submerge. He loses awareness of his surroundings, lets it all drift away, like a fist slowly unclenching…_

_ And slamming down right into the base of his skull, as his spider-sense explodes inside his brain._

_ Peter's eyes shoot open; he stands, clutching his head, reeling, as every nerve in his body, every instinct, every cell, screams at him that something is wrong, something is terribly, terribly_ wrong –

_ The wall disintegrates in a deafening roar of crumbling brick, smashing glass, splintering wood, sending Peter tumbling to the ground. Blinking away the dust, Peter perceives a dark figure, suspended in the air before him, looming over him; a figure held up by four writhing, shining metal tentacles._

_ Before Peter even has time to get up, one of those tentacles shoots out, slams into his ribcage, sends him flying; his body is weightless, and powerless to absorb the jolt as he slams into the opposite wall. He feels something crack; whether it's the plaster or his ribs, he can't be entirely sure._

_ Ock strides into the room, picks Peter up again, lifts him up high, throws him down onto the floor, the whole room shuddering at the impact. "Octavius – wait – " Peter tries; he can't fight him, can't tip his hand. Secret identity. Protect loved ones. Even if it means taking the beating of your life, even if it means taking the_ last _beating of your life…_

_ Octavius, needless to say, does not heed his request. One tentacle holds Peter down; another comes flying towards him, hits his face with the force of a locomotive; a geyser of blood streams down from his nose, almost chokes him, bitter and acrid. Fighting through the pain, Peter struggles, finally pulls himself free of the strangling arm; he rushes precisely one step towards Ock, drawing back a fist, before he is snatched up again, the world turning upside-down, suspended by one leg, held up for Ock's inspection like an animal about to be dissected._

_ Up this close, Peter is almost shocked to notice that Ock looks like hell, haggard and unshaven; his glasses have slipped down the bridge of his nose, and his eyes,_ _rimmed with red and bordered by black, are wild, insane. Even at the best of times, there is little sense in trying to reason with Doctor Octopus; now, it would be impossible. He's more than obsessed, Peter realises; he's possessed, driven by some terrible, unnameable demon. The hatred in those eyes is as searing as the sun, an almost physical force; Peter has never even seen Ock look at Spider-Man in such a way. All control has been lost. All bets are off._

_ "What makes you think_ you _deserve her?!" Octavius screams, his voice a bestial cry, throwing Peter upwards, smashing him against the ceiling; the light fixture tumbles to Earth, smashes. "What makes you think_ you _have any _right_ to her?! To keep her from me! KEEP HER FROM ME!"_

_Peter squirms out of Ock's grasp, falls to the ground, manages to twist in a manner that makes his falling onto his feet seem like a lucky accident. He stands, swipes at the blood dripping from his nose, pants: "She - doesn't - _want_ you any more!"_

_"I don't_ care!" _roars Ock; another tentacle comes barrelling towards Peter, catches him in the chest; the two of them go speeding backwards – _

_ The far wall joins its companion,_ _collapsing around Peter as he sails through it, smashing past plaster, mortar, past brick; white light blossoms behind Peter's eyes, and his bones grind inside the loose bag of flesh that his body has become. He hits wet tile with a smack, collides with porcelain; a freezing cold fall of water, and he realises that he has been thrown, through the living room wall, into the bathroom. Blood – no longer merely from his nose, but from above his right eye, from his arms, from his legs, everywhere – spatters the white floor; he tries to steady himself with his hand, but it slips in the red mess, sends him back down to the floor. Unsurprisingly, his skull is pounding like a drum; there isn't a part of him that doesn't scream with pain every time he breathes._

_ Ock ducks through the hole in the wall, his tentacles filling the small, enclosed space; everywhere Peter looks, there is writhing gray metal, closing off the world. Two steel arms shoot out, pin him by the arms; another two by the legs. Peter tries to sit up; Ock places one foot on his chest, shoving him back down, every inch the conqueror, annexing his prey. He emits a wordless, animal snarl, witch-light in his eyes, burning through the black lenses; Peter's spider-sense is almost howling inside his brain; nothing he can do; Ock seizes him by the arms, and pulls._

_ Peter can feel the bones as they splinter inside their casing of meat and muscle; can feel the sockets shrieking as they separate from his arms; feels nothing more, will never feel anything again, anything other than this pain, this monstrous pain, straight_ _from Hell. The world changes color, fades to black, bursts into white; he tastes stomach acid burning the back of his throat; his screams feel as if they will burst his own eardrums. _

_ "You don't need her!" Ock rants, fists pressed to his chest, and within his voice, buried beneath the bile, lies a keening note of despair. "You could have someone else. You could have_ anyone _else! You're _young! _You're_ handsome! _The world is still open to you!_" _He stops, catches his breath, brushes his hair from his face. When his voice returns, it is the voice of the old Doc Ock, the one Peter has known for so long, ice beading on chilled iron. _

_ "You," he says quietly, "Are so lucky, Mr. Parker. _So_ lucky. You cannot even begin to comprehend the sheer scale of your luck. I want what it is that you have become accustomed to having, Mr. Parker. _I _want to be the lucky one."_

_ Peter cannot respond; the pain is all-consuming, wracking, renders him a jellyfish, flopping uselessly on the ground. He doesn't feel all that lucky, that's for damn sure. If there is any thought at all that rattles inside his brain, it is that he has let MJ down, that he has fought in her favor, and lost._

_ Through the tunnel of agony, Peter sees Ock produce something from his pocket, something that glints in the thin sunlight; a hypodermic syringe. Ock bites off the cap, pushes the plunger upward, squeezing out the air bubbles, tapping it once or twice._

_ Peter emits an incoherent noise, one that he somehow manages to force into words. "Nnnnnnnwhaaaaa…?"_

_"Would you like to know what this is?" Ock's voice is flat now, terrible in its flatness, and it's so much worse than when he was screaming with rage, so very much worse; the only thing more terrifying than Ock being out of control is Ock being in control._

_ "It's morphine, Mr. Parker. From the same supply of morphine, in fact, that I used to treat Mary Jane when first I operated upon her. Does it interest you to know that, Mr. Parker? Do you find it enlightening?" The tentacles tighten around Peter's shattered arms, pull them even further away from the sockets, and though Peter tries not to scream again, he soon realises that he is doing so anyway._

_ Ock smiles tightly. "You know, in this city, some people pay a great deal of money to procure this substance. In a way, I am doing you a favor."_

_ A pinprick in Peter's left arm. He squirms, bucks, tries to fend it off any way he can, but there is no way that he can. And, as the heat begins to creep down his veins, begins to turn the web of nerves inside his body to warm, melted ice-water, it no longer seems to matter. The pain disappears, takes flight like a black-winged bird, soaring off into a claret-red sky. In the middle of that sky, a whirling ribbon of black, mesmerising, seductive, beckoning him towards it, closer, closer, inside it, follow it all the way down._

_ "Who knows?" Ock's voice echoes, following Peter into the spiralling dark. "This way, you may not even feel it when I kill you."_

It's all about energy.

That's the first thought I have as I wake up, though I actually don't remember falling asleep. It can't have been for more than a couple of hours, anyway. I check the clock on the wall: seven AM, and the last I remember it was about four. Somewhere along the line, I seem to have become a light sleeper. Peter's probably resting perfectly comfortably; it almost seems unfair. I mean, all things considered, I've been a lot busier than he has.

It's all about energy. I have no idea why I'm thinking this, why the phrase is lodged in my head. Nor can I think of a reason why it conjures up images of phone wires, TV cables, bright sparks shooting off down a wet road at night. Strange dreams I've been having lately. Strange dreams.

_Maybe it's from something I heard on TV_, I think, gazing blearily up at the screen. Things can seep into your unconscious, infect your mind, if you don't watch out for them.

I lie back against the pillows, sitting up as far as I can, arms resting limply in the restraints. I watch the screen blankly for a while, watching the morning hosts' annoyingly chirpy banter, wondering how anyone could possibly be this pleasant and civil at seven AM.

I'm allowing myself to be lulled back to sleep, or at least into a state of light doziness, when the screen blinks, and a message, _Stand By For Urgent Bulletin_, flickers across it.

Even before the news anchor appears onscreen, a very cold feeling has taken hold of me.

"Good morning, I'm David Chase for Channel Six. We have just received word that a major hostage situation is developing in Lower Manhattan. We are live on the scene with our correspondant, Angela Morgan. Angela?"

The scene cuts to a petite, overcoated young woman holding a mike, standing out front of an enormous, glass-walled skyscraper. Around the edges of the screen, you can make out a huge, milling crowd of curious gawkers, cordoned off by police barriers. Cops are standing, silent and tense, in the background, huddled against their cars, blue and red lights flashing across their faces.

"David, I'm standing outside the Julienne Academy of Ballet here in New York City," she begins, glancing over her shoulder, "Where it would appear that Doctor Otto Octavius – better known as Doctor Octopus – has taken a class of young students prisoner on one of the building's upper floors. Everyone else has been evacuated; so far no demands have been issued…"

_Otto._ My lips form the name, but no sound accompanies it.

"Angela, are the students safe?" The anchor asks. "Has anyone been injured?"

"I'm not certain, David. I…" She stops, listens into her earpiece. "David, I've just been informed that Octavius has in fact managed to install a live video feed inside the Academy, and has demanded that he be allowed to make a statement on camera. We are diverting the feed to his frequency now; at any second, it should – "

She vanishes. And he appears.

There is that face I have come to know so well, staring down the camera; there is the shining black coat, black hair, black lenses, black everything. My life of the last handful of months, stored away so neatly in my mind, breaks loose of its bonds at the sight of him; the memories tumble one over the other, make my heart swell, make it want to run to him, wagging its tail, a puppy-dog eager to be kicked just one more time.

I fight it down, stare at the grainy screen, concentrate with all my might, as though I can communicate with him via telepathy, as though the link between us could really be that strong.

"Hello, New York," he begins; it's the exact same way my tape began, the tape that kicked off my criminal career.

"I don't intend to take up too much time; as you will soon realise, time is of the very essence in this situation. Therefore, I intend to make this brief." His voice, chips of ice, tumbling into a darkened chasm. "As you are doubtless aware, I have taken a class of thirty-five ballet students, their teacher included, hostage here within the Julienne Academy."

The camera swings to one side; huddled in a corner, beneath a barre, against the mirrored wall, are a group of kids, boys and girls, mostly girls, not one of whom can possibly be older than fifteen or sixteen. They look drained, pale, terrified, hunched over in black leotards and brightly-colored tights. They want their parents. They want to go home. As Otto claimed, their teacher is with them also, a slender woman in her forties, hair scraped back in a black bun, looking three times her age, terror stretching the lines on her face as she cuddles one or two of them closer to her.

Back to Otto. "At this stage, you are most likely asking yourself: what exactly is it that he hopes to gain from this action? Money, perhaps? Power?" He shakes his head, lowering it; I catch a glimpse of his eyes, and there is nothing inside them that I like. Nothing inside them, period.

"I'm afraid not. I have one demand, and one demand only. It is not open to debate, nor negotiation, nor compromise." He lowers his head again, stares straight into the camera, his gaze burning out across the air-waves. "I want Mary Jane Watson. I want her delivered here, safe, unharmed, unfettered. I want her returned to me. And for every hour that Mary Jane is _not_ by my side, one of these talented, pretty little anorexics will die."

A collective scream arises from off-camera; for a moment I think it's a reaction to what he's just said, but I'm wrong: Otto steps back from the camera, and pulls in front of him, a tentacle wrapped firmly around her swan-neck, a curly-haired little ballerina, about fifteen years old, her moon-shaped face smattered with freckles, shining with tears. She stares into the camera searchingly, gulping and gasping, trying to hide the fear in her eyes, proud even now.

"I ask you," Otto continues, "Fine officers of the law - could you live with it on your conscience if this promising young artist, this flower of young womanhood, were cut down in her prime? If her life were ended senselessly, needlessly, all because you refused to listen to reason and give me back that which belongs to me?"

He pauses; and it's the second that that pause takes place, the precise moment, that I realise what's going to happen, that I jerk up against the restraints, the straps cutting into my wrists; that I scream, at the top of my lungs: "NO! NO, OTTO –"

_Snap._

The girl's body drops, gracefully, as if she had fainted, as if it were part of a dance routine. Her head lolls to one side, mercifully away from the camera.

"I thought not," Otto says calmly.

He tosses her aside.

Slugged in the gut. Can't breathe. No air in the room, no air in my lungs. Muscles slack. I sag back against the pillows, don't feel them underneath me. Might as well be floating in blackest space.

_Otto,_ I think, _has killed a little girl. It is seven o'clock in the morning, and Otto has just killed a little girl, live, on national television. Fifteen years old. Murdered. Just like that. So fast. So fast._

It's all over. The world is ending, or has gone mad, or both. Let it be a dream. Let it be fifteen minutes ago. Let it be fifteen years ago, let us all live in the past. Let me not see what I saw. Let me not know this, God, let me not know this, about him, about the world…

I can't even raise my hand to wipe away the tears.

A bright spark at the back of my brain, a prerecorded message from long ago, kicking in, staving off the darkness I feel closing in upon me. Don't worry. Remember who your husband is. Peter Parker, the Amazing, the Spectacular, the Sensational - Spider-Man! He'll be there before you can blink. He'll save the day, because that's what he does. No one else will suffer. No one else will die.

Otto isn't shedding any tears. Not one. He continues to speak, as if nothing had happened. "Perhaps, however, this will not prove enough incentive for you to return my girl to me. Perhaps the death of a handful of children is something the NYPD _can_ live with, after all. Therefore, I have taken the liberty of including one last hostage…"

The camera swings again. And that's when I see him.

Peter.

Slumped against the wall opposite the sobbing dancers. Motionless. Doing nothing, saying nothing. One arm is twisted across his chest; the other hangs at an unnatural angle by his side. A thin stream of saliva runs from the corner of his mouth, stretched in a vacant, blissed-out smile. His pupils are dilated, black as the bottom of a well. He has no idea, no idea whatsoever, where he is, what's going on, what has just happened. Helpless.

I didn't even realise I _could_ swear that loud.


	10. Beasts

**_Freak Like Me_**

_By_

**_Santanico_**

****

**_Ten: Beasts_**

****

(You knew.)

(But if I'd been there, I could have stopped him. I could have made him see…)

(Right from the very beginning, you knew what this man was. What he was capable of. The way his mind worked. You knew.)

(It doesn't have to be this way. We can go back. We can go back to how things were. If I could only talk to him, only see him…)

(You just didn't _want _to know.)

The insistent voices inside my head, mean, hard, pitiless, are the only things I can hear over the sound of my own sobs, my gasping, choking breaths. Feeling has left every part of my body, save for my stomach, which has transformed into a roiling, churning mass of snakes.

(Isn't that why you always changed the channel whenever they started talking about the people he'd killed? Isn't that why you threw out any newspapers that made mention of his body count? You couldn't take it. You couldn't bear to think that someone who had been good to you could have done such terrible things. Well, now you can't change the channel, MJ. Now you can't just crumple up the evidence and stuff it in the trash. Now you have to listen. Now you have to see.)

(I can help him. I can save him. He didn't kill anyone while he was with me. He would have changed. For me.)

(Oh, you thought you could _save _him? Is that it? You thought you could heal his pain, kiss it all better, make everything all sunshine and roses? Stupid girl, don't you know it doesn't work that way? Don't you know that a wild creature, even when it's curled up by your side and purring, even when it's mewling for your affection, even when it does tricks and rolls over on its back to let you pet it, is still a wild creature? And a wild creature can turn at any time. Particularly, especially, when it's been wounded.)

(A "wild creature"? Oh, is that what you're telling yourself now? That he's subhuman, something so removed from the rest of the species as to be totally alien to you? For Christ's sake. As if it were that simple. As if it could be that easy. He's no animal. He's a man. A man who was good to me once, who helped me to learn things about myself I might never have known. I don't know if I would have survived without him. I still don't know if I can survive without him…)

It goes on and on like this. Two voices, equally strong, screaming inside my head. Oh, goddamn you, Otto. I bet you think this is all proof of how much you care, don't you? Proof of how much you deserve me. You're willing to kill for me. And I'm supposed to be touched by that. I'm supposed to feel _grateful _for that.

And even now, even _now_, I can't hate him. I can't just switch over from having him be the only important thing in my life to having him be Psycho Supervillain Number Two Hundred and Fifteen. He must've had a good reason to do it. I should never have gone away. I should have stayed, and maybe if I'd stayed we would've been happy, eventually, made each other happy, and he wouldn't…

Peter. God, he's got Peter. After all this time, after so many failed attempts, he's actually got Peter. It'd be funny if it weren't so insanely, nightmarishly awful. He finally has Spider-Man, right there, right in his grip, from the looks of things totally helpless, and he'll probably never even know it.

If he kills Peter, he'll definitely never know it.

If he kills Peter…

If he kills Peter, I really don't know. My mind goes blank beyond that point, fades to black. He won't kill Peter. He can't kill Peter.

He might.

He will.

The door opens; I snap my gaze across towards it, trying to swallow my tears, swallow the taste of my breaking heart. The nurse, her face paler than my sheets, strides in, snaps off the television set. "Did you see…?" she asks, her voice wavering.

"Yeah," I whisper. Then, consciously strengthening my tone: "Yeah. So listen, untie these straps, get some sort of police escort or something together and we'll head over there. I can – "

She stares at me as if I've suddenly begun speaking in tongues. "What do you mean?"

"A police escort. A car, a driver. To get me over to the ballet school?" Still that blank expression; am I speaking a different language here? "He wants to see me. That was his only demand, right? So once I'm there, I can…I don't know, okay, I don't _know _what I'll do, but the kids'll be out of danger, and that's what matters. So just untie the straps and let me go to him."

The nurse shakes her head, the metallic, authoritative look returning to her features. "That's out of the question. Not only are you in no physical condition to go, but we have no way of knowing what your intentions are –"

" – Are you kidding me?" My voice rises; I don't mean for it to do so, but it does, and it is lending my case absolutely no credibility whatsoever. "I mean, are you _kidding_ me? Look, didn't he just say, five minutes ago, that he's gonna kill one kid for every hour I'm not there? Didn't he just prove, beyond a_ shadow_ of a doubt, that he's willing to do that? And, and, my husband, he's got my _husband_ for God's sake, and he's done something to him – "

"Ms. Watson," the nurse interrupts firmly, "While you are staying here at Ravencroft, you will be treated with the utmost dignity and respect. However, you _are _still a criminal, and considered to be a fairly dangerous one at that. Surely even you can see why we simply _cannot_ allow you back into the company of Otto Octavius? You've got to stay where you are. The police will - "

"The _police_?" I cry. "Since _when _have the police been able to do anything to –"

"Ms. Watson, if you cannot control yourself, I will be forced to sedate you –"

"Please," I beg, lurching up, pulling hard against the straps; she flinches, actually flinches, and only a few months ago that would have gratified me immensely. Now it just fills me with desolation. Yes, MJ, you are completely and utterly alone. "Please. You have to let me go to him. I think I'm the only one, the only one left he'll talk to, and – oh, God, there just isn't time to _argue_ any of this! Just untie me!"

"If you try to attack me," the nurse begins, her voice quivering again, and I know I haven't got a chance in hell, "Then I warn you now that you are under video surveillance. It will all be recorded, and used against you –"

"How could I _possibly_ attack you?" I growl, jerking my head down towards the straps, neither of which have budged an inch.

"If you threaten me in any way –"

Oh, God, I could cry. Again. I could cry and scream and thrash and I could _kill _this stupid bitch, I could _tear_ her like a - "I am not," I say, trying my damnedest to keep my voice rational and level, "Threatening you. _I_ don't want to hurt anyone, you understand? But if you don't let me go, people _will_ be hurt." The side of my head, the base of my spine, are beginning to throb in tandem; beneath the pounding in my skull I hear a scratching at the door, a thin and sickening whine: the hellhound, my hellhound, wants to come back inside, back for more.

"You're staying right where you – "

"Do you know who I am?" I hear the devil-dog growl, from deep within the throat that no longer belongs to me.

The nurse stops in mid-sentence, blinks twice in annoyance. "I beg your pardon?"

"I asked you, do you know who I _am_?" All it took was one glimpse of him. All it took was one five-minute exposure, through a medium of television wires and projected two-dimensional images, for him to slip back into my system.

The nurse nods uncertainly. "You're, uh. You're Mary Jane Watson…"

"Damn right I'm Mary Jane Watson. You brainless, twittering little _cow_. And if you've been following my madcap adventures these past few months, cupcake, then it should be pretty clear by now that I am _not_," my voice, the hellhound's voice, climbs higher and higher, "anyone you want to _screw with!_ Undo these goddamn _straps_ –" And I'm screaming now, and I'm sitting somewhere in the back of my head watching myself as I scream and I can't stand it, I'm cringing, I want to be somewhere else, someone else " – Or you'll _pay_, you ignorant sow, you'll pay and pay_ dearly _– "

The nurse says nothing; just presses her lips together tightly, reaches around behind her, opens the door, and stalks out, closing it behind her with a 'click' containing more finality than a slam ever could.

My teeth champ together so tightly you'd think I was trying to bite through a gag, or maybe a muzzle. I fall back down to the bed, ignoring the twinge of pain that crackles up my spine upon impact; a scarlet heartbeat is pulsing through my skull, reverberating down my body. Withdrawal symptoms, maybe. Going cold turkey. Trying to kick my habit, Otto, and you know that means you.

A moment's glance. That was all it took. And only hours ago I was so convinced I was rid of your infection. So convinced that one nice, long sleep and a nice, long talk with the man I married was all it would take to sweat out your toxins. I should have known better. You can put your lips to the snake-bite as often as you like, but you won't always get every drop of the poison out.

My whole body is shaking; the straps rattle at my sides. An acidic feeling, deep down in the pit of my stomach. I make myself sick, so damn sick. Out of my line of vision, down on the sterile white floor in this sterile white room, the hellhound snuffles; I hear its talons clicking against the linoleum, hear it growl contentedly to itself, and realise that, far from going away, it is only settling down to sleep. To wait for me.

****

_The nurse pulls the door shut, exhaling softly as she locks it. Thank God she's out of there. Tate was a fool to imagine that that girl had any chance of recovery, even after having the tentacle removed. She supposes she'll have to ready a cell for her in the psychiatric wing, as soon as her physical recuperation is…_

_ "Excuse me? Excuse me! Nurse!"_

_From the corner of her eye, the nurse sees the monochrome shape, black and white and gray, rushing up; she turns around just as it arrives, and waits patiently as the young nun stands there, trying to catch her breath, _

_ "Nurse – I – hello – my name is Sister Aileen Guiterrez. I understand that there is a patient here, a young woman, she is called Mary Jane W – "_

_ The nurse cuts her off sharply. "How did you know she was here? Her location is being kept strictly classified."_

_ Sister Guiterrez gestures, vaguely irritably, waving one hand. "I did not. Know that she was here, that is to say. I work in a bad area, very bad, and I hear things. The word that is on the street. Rumors. In this case, I decided to follow them."_

_ The nurse snorts, turns briskly, begins to walk down the corridor; undaunted, Sister Guiterrez follows in her wake. "Here to try and save her soul, Sister? You're very dedicated, I must say."_

_ Sister Guiterrez shakes her head. "I only wished to…see her. Only wished to talk with her. You see, I know her, a little…" She trails off, her brow puckering. "I met her once. Only briefly. Before all of this. And when I did, I should have helped her. I did not, and I wished to – apologise, or to…" She sighs heavily, gazing down, burying her hands in her coat pockets. "Honestly, I am not certain. But if you will only allow me a brief moment of her time –"_

_ "Sorry, Sister. Not only is the list of visitors who are actually allowed to see Mary Jane extremely limited, but she's not exactly in a fit state to receive visitors right now. I take it you saw the news?"_

_ Sister Guiterrez blinks. "No. No, I did not. I have been driving from the city for the last hour or so…"_

_The nurse emits a grunt of disgust. "Yeah, well. Her boyfriend, Doc Ock, just killed a teenage girl live on national television, about fifteen minutes ago." Watching the nun's eyes widen and lips part in abject horror, the nurse adds: "Yeah. And Watson saw it, too. She's not taking it very well. Got pretty aggressive. In fact, I was just on my way to pick up some sedative for her. So if you'll excuse me, Sister…"_

_ But the nun, damn her, won't be blown off so easily; a look of iron determination crossing her delicate features, she sheds her coat and folds it neatly over one arm. The nurse watches in displeasure. "You will not mind, then," Sister Guiterrez asks politely, "If I choose to stay? Perhaps your superiors," she continues, placing gentle emphasis on the word, "Will allow me to see her. A little later."_

_ The nurse stares at Sister Guiterrez grimly. Jesus H. Christ. She spends her whole damn day taking care of lunatics and psychopaths, sticking needles into diseased veins, stitching up torn flesh, fixing broken people. She certainly doesn't need this._

_ "That should be just fine, Sister," she snaps, failing to keep the sarcasm out of her voice, turns, and stalks away._

_ Sister Guiterrez watches the nurse leave, very deliberately allowing a feeling of calm to situate itself within the depths of her troubled mind. She spent the entire drive up here attempting to center herself in just such a way, trying to relax, to trust in God that she would know what to do, what to say, when she finally arrived. And now she's here, and the chances that she'll even get to see Mary Jane Watson are looking very slender indeed, and, back in the city, the man who started all of this has just murdered a young girl. _

_ It's just not all that easy to be patient, sometimes. Not all that easy to retain a sense of faith._

_ She walks back up the hall and eases herself down into the uncomfortable plastic chair beside Mary Jane's securely locked door, the chair in which Peter Parker was sitting only hours ago. She breathes out slowly, closes her eyes, counts silently to ten, opens them, squares her jaw, and sits back to endure what may well prove to be a very long wait._

****

_He did it. The bastard actually did it._

_Garrett sags against the side of the police car, the squawking radio clutched in his hand long forgotten, staring up at the looming building, parted lips turned bone-dry. _

_ He knows he shouldn't be surprised. Not in the least. It isn't as if this is the first time Ock has killed in cold blood, killed a perfect stranger, a total innocent. But it had been so long since he had, and Garrett had felt that perhaps Watson's influence…_

_ He shakes his head. Stupid. Oh, stupid. _

_Goddamn. Fifteen years old._

_ A commotion from the crowd beyond, the crowd of which Garrett had almost ceased to be aware; a harsh cry, like a distressed bird, and a man races past the barrier, thin, wiry, scarlet face wet with tears. The surrounding police officers try to restrain him, but not before he makes it to Garrett's side._

_ "You!" he shrieks, racing up to Garrett, seizing him by the shirt collar, startling the detective out of his torpor; two officers grab him by the arms, holding him back, though he seems not to notice them. "You let this happen! You and all the other worthless cops in this city – you sons of bitches, my daughter is in there! _My daughter!"

_ "Sir," Garrett tries, "Please, try to remain calm. We are doing ev - :_

_"You're doing _squat _as far as I can see!" snarls the distraught parent. "For Christ's sake! Just give the crazy bastard what he wants! Give him that goddamn girl and _end _all this!"_

_ "Sir," Garrett repeats, trying desperately to sound reasonable, to sound authoritative, to sound like he has even the faintest idea what to do. "We just – we can't _do_ that. Not only would reuniting him with Mary Jane Watson probably make the situation even more volatile, but the NYPD simply doesn't negotiate with terrorists – "_

_ The man spits in Garrett's face._

_Garrett staggers a little, steps back as the officers drag the man away; the saliva seems to burn his flesh, to peel it away, even as he draws a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket, scrubs vigorously, viciously, at his face._

_ Exhaling, he lowers the handkerchief. The first thing he sees is a couple, middle-aged, middle-class, being gently led away by a female officer, who speaks to them softly and kindly. They are silent, and were it not for the odd gleam of sunlight that escapes from the lowering clouds above, their tears would not even be noticeable. _

_ "Who are they?" Garrett asks in a strangled voice. "That couple."_

_"Those two? That's, uh, Mr. and Mrs. Lowell," someone replies. "They're – they were the dead girl's parents."_

_ "Right," Garrett whispers, staring down at the handkerchief as he knots it tightly over his fingers. "Right."_

_ The dead girl's parents._

_Goddamn._

****

**There are times when…**

** There are times when measures, measures that some would call extreme, must be taken. Sometimes, in order to secure the things one wants – the things one needs – one must resort to certain actions which one might find distasteful. The public responds to shock tactics far better than to reason alone; emotion, not intellect, must be appealed to. Negative emotion particularly.**

** There are times when situations do not turn out quite the way one would have hoped.**

** They have covered their companion's body over with her coat. Whether it is out of respect or simply so that they no longer have to look at her, I cannot be certain. I suppose I could have stopped them, forced them to continue to gaze upon her, to behold the reality of death, to witness and keep witnessing what will become of each and every one of them unless my single and reasonable demand is met.**

** I did not try to stop them. **

**I watch them, from my position at the window, from the corners of my eyes. They are all so young, so achingly young. All soft skin and pimples and bright, innocent eyes, glazed with tears. I doubt they had any real knowledge of life's sorrows until this last hour had passed. If any of them survive this, some day they may feel grateful.**

** Strange. This is the first time I have killed since Mary Jane entered my life. I thought perhaps it might make me feel more stable, somehow. Less fragmented. But I just feel incredibly tired. **

** Perhaps I should have killed Parker instead. Someone who deserved it. It might have upset Mary Jane at first to learn of his demise, but eventually she would have realised that I had done it in her own best interests. There are times when one must eradicate from one's life the things that make one weak.**

** Once they give her back to me, I will no longer feel tired. It will all have been worth it. Ends justifying means. One life, one small and extinguished life – one or more lives – is not such a terrible price to pay in the service of a greater need. Regrettable, perhaps, but necessary. Any scientist will tell you the same.**

** I wish I could go to sleep.**

** I wonder if that girl's parents were watching. **

**The only other true adult in the room, the ballet teacher – she was watching. She sits now, cross-legged, stiff-backed, on the floor, staring straight ahead of her, her gaze deliberately level, deliberately calm. Her students have clustered around her, sensing in her a respite in the midst of the storm. An authority figure. They trust that she will – that she can – keep them all safe, despite all evidence to the contrary.**

** An elegant woman. Dark, swan-necked, aquiline-nosed and high-cheekboned. Perhaps forty, forty-one years old. Expressionless, composed, and practically vibrating with fear. **

** I slowly cross the room, keeping one eye trained upon her; she seems to feel it, as her gaze follows me, her head perfectly still. I take one of the folded chairs that lines the outer edges of the room and unfold it with one tentacle; the protesting squeal of its hinges echoes through the still and silent air. I place the chair before her, turning it backwards, sitting down, leaning my arms against the back, observing her. She does not lower her gaze, nor does she seek to meet mine. She simply keeps staring ahead, staring through me, though I note that she draws her students slightly closer.**

** "What is your name?" I ask, after what seems a long period of silence.**

**The woman raises her head, gradually turns it towards me, until her eyes meet mine; they are shining and dark as black beads. "Madame," she intones, "Belva. Kaminski." **

** Her Russian accent is imbued with restrained dignity. She states her name as if it ought to mean something to me, as if her reputation ought to precede her; as I am unfamiliar with the world of professional ballet, I cannot provide the appropriate response.**

** "Have you taught at this school very long, Madame Kaminski?" I enquire.**

**A faint look of disbelief crosses her face, disbelief and distaste; _why is he asking me this?_ "Seventeen years," she says briskly. A muscle in her jaw quivers, then is still.**

** "I see," I reply. "I see."**

**Quiet. The students watch me with enormous eyes, apparently under the impression that my glasses make me blind. In the corner, Mary Jane's husband stares into nothingness. High on the wall, the clock slowly ticks its way towards the next deadly hour.**

** Madame Kaminski is uncomfortable. Sad, angry, frightened. She hates me. It bubbles under her pale and well-preserved skin, burns so bright I fear it may blister. She hates me, and there is nothing, not one thing, that she can do about it. **

** "The girl," I begin, without thinking, my mind clear and blank, and I watch the woman as she flinches, as her gaze flashes up to me. "What was her name?"**

** Madame Kaminski stares at me, rendered speechless. _How dare he? How dare he ask about her, now, after what he's done, after…? _"Amy," she finally manages. "Amy Lowell."**

** "Amy Lowell," I repeat, trying the name out, this name that no longer has an object, no longer applies. This name that I destroyed. "Was she a good student?"**

** "She was…" Kaminski swallows. "Undisciplined. She had not had time to develop. To grow…"**

** I nod. "It can be difficult, can't it?"**

**She looks up quizzically.**

** "Instructing a student," I explain. "Trying to make something out of the raw materials you have been handed." I rest my chin on my hand. "You spend so much time," I muse, my thoughts drifting, "Molding them and sculpting them. Reshaping them so that there is nothing left of what they were – nothing untoward, nothing rough or broken. No longings for what they once had. No nostalgia. No sadness. No past.**

** "You erase them, and then you fill in the blank space. Fill it with something better. Something that resembles your idea of perfection much more closely. It's such hard work, isn't it, Madame Kaminski?" I ask. "And such a thankless task, really. Because there's always the risk…always the risk that, some day, they might not need you any more. That you'll invest so much of yourself, your life, in them, and then one day you'll turn around and they'll be…gone." **

** A collapse back into silence. Then: "I don't want to talk with you about it," she replies.**

**Sharp. Crisp. A quick and businesslike stab. **

**"Do you want to talk with me at all?" I ask.**

**"Are you really going to kill all of us?" she asks instead of answering, clutching the young charges at her sides closer, even closer. The two girls hold her waist tightly, frightened children, young adults no more; they are no longer looking at me, cannot seem to bear the sight of me. "Like Amy? If they do not give you back your woman?"**

** Your woman. Yes. _My_ woman. My girl. She seems to have understood my point. **

** "I said I would," I say slowly, controlling each word as it falls from my lips. "I suppose I'll have to..." **

**I pause, look to the shadowed side of the room where the crumpled, indistinct shape that was once Amy Lowell lies. Faceless and formless. Her coat a shroud. "You of all people ought to be able to comprehend, Madame Kaminski…the importance of putting on a performance that everyone will believe in."**

** "Monster!" spits Kaminski; I turn back just in time to see her eyes widen, to hear the collective intake of breath from her students, her mistake instantly realised, her doom, they feel certain, now utterly sealed.**

** I gaze at her a moment, two moments, three. **

**"Yes. If you like," I reply. **

**My tentacles rise, carrying me back across the room, back to the window. The last thing I see before I turn my back on the scene is Kaminski casting an anxious glance over at Parker, but I am too tired to care why.**

** I stand before the glass once more, resisting the urge to lean my forehead against its welcoming coolness. I feel the presences at my back grating against my nerves; and the gaping black hole in their fluttering midst, the space that is left by the presence of a girl who was there so recently, and is there no longer.**

** There are times when people may call you a monster, and you will realise, without feeling one way or the other about it, that they may be right.**

****

_"Do you think he sees?"_

_The voice twists, curls and spirals through Peter's brain, weaving in and out of the synapses, reverberating down the hidden passageways of his consciousness. It soars through liquid skies, whirls past the eardrums and infects the optic nerves. His intricate system, not entirely human, pulls itself together to connect sight with sound._

_ The room is black. Not merely dark, but black. Black like the blood that hauls itself, snail-slow, through his veins; black like the sluggish waters of a muddy swamp at a moonless midnight; black like the secret chambers of the human heart. And there is a human heart, somewhere, beating slowly, a mournful and foreboding _thoom_, every other second. Every time the heart beats, what little light Peter can make out fades in, and out; in, and out. _

_ Two women. They stand beside a blurred and indistinct figure, whose aura, Peter realises, permeates their shared space, is that which is turning it black; indeed, darkness radiates from it, rolls away from it in waves so strong you can almost feel them rippling across your skin._

_ The women. Bright beings, very bright. Luminous, even. Wavering, rippling, their hair streaming in some unseen and unfelt gust of wind, or perhaps the flow of a tide; they could be under water. One of them, once the lines of her face and body can be made out, is tall, and almost grotesquely muscular; her hair is a lush waterfall of pale yellow, whipping across her face, winding itself in serpentine fashion around her cinched waist in its ludicrous red leotard. She lounges indolently, arms crossed, eyelids lowered over icy blue orbs, the long lashes sweeping her cheekbones. Peter feels certain that she is the one who has spoken; how could she not be? He knows her, knows her from someplace else, some time else. She is an instrument designed for the quick, vicious stab; and the words, spoken long ago, still penetrate the thick black air. _

_ The other woman is something different altogether, almost a different species. Small and pale and delicate. You could break her over your knee. Black hair, reflecting a dim blue highlight as she dips her head to gaze upon her companion, calmly and reflectively. A pretty summer dress, totally inappropriate for this time of year. She is a soft word, left unspoken. A delicate trace of perfume, lost on a wind you only remember. Vague and reminiscent. Vaguely reminiscent of Mary Jane._

_ "Do you?" asks the tall blonde one again, her tone bossy and imposing. "Think? That he sees?"_

_ The brunette shrugs, a graceful rise and fall of thin, pale shoulders. "I suppose he would have to by now."_

_ Peter squeezes his eyelids shut, tries to ignore the pounding of the heart, the pounding of his skull, but the rhythms are intertwined now, there can be no escape._

_ "And yet," muses the blonde, "I really can't help but feel it's gone much too far."_

_"Far too far," agrees the brunette. "Far and far and far. Enough, now, don't you think, Stunner?"_

_ "One would hope so, Mary Alice," replies the blonde. "But if the beast will not be sated…"_

_ "The beast can't be sated," states the brunette firmly. "Honestly. Trying to appeal to the beast at this stage would be a waste of everyone's time. Pure futility! Pure madness."_

_ A loud sob, coming from just beyond the edge of Peter's vision; he could see its source, he supposes, if he were to turn his head, but he does not turn his head._

_ "Then you would suggest…?" asks the blonde seriously, dark eyebrows knotted together._

_ "I don't think he sees," says the brunette thoughtfully, crossing one ankle over the other. "Not yet. He holds his hands over his eyes so superbly well…"_

_ "…One might," concludes the blonde, "Mistake his fingernails for pupils." _

_"His eyes are sharpened talons," nods the brunette._

_Get me the hell out of here, thinks Peter drowsily._

_"Tear the talons out," says the blonde._

_"He must," says the brunette, "Be made to see what he has only let himself glimpse. Bite down on the sour fruit."_

_ "No more dark glasses," says the blonde._

_ Another sob; and this time Peter turns his head, this time he sees her._

_Small and huddled. Knees against her chest, feet in shabby ballet slippers spackled with blood. Her curly hair is loose, trailing over her moon-shaped face, obscured already by her splayed fingers. _

_"You cry," Peter whispers, locating his voice and finding it hoarse, "So quietly."_

_ "I don't want anyone to see me," whispers the girl. "Everyone here is crazy and bad." She presses her knees closer to her chest, drops her hands from her face, looks up at Peter; her eyes reflect an image he does not understand, an image of a form draped in white cloth. "I didn't want to die," she breathes._

_ "Who does, these days?" drawls the blonde, seemingly only having just noticed the girl, yet failing to acknowledge Peter in any way. The girl flinches._

_ "Death. There's just no future in it," remarks the brunette._

_"Speaking of which," says the blonde conversationally, "Do you think she will come?"_

_"She will. Must," responds the brunette._

_"Yes," whispers the girl. "Oh yes."_

_"And when she gets here?" asks the blonde._

_"Ah. Then we'll know where we stand."_

_"And the beast?"_

_The brunette rolls her eyes in Peter's direction. "Is _his_ problem now."_

_ The blurry figure between the two women turns, a motion as slow as that of oil in water; and Peter sees a white face amid all the black, a white face characterised only by twin holes of darkness where you would expect to see the eyes. Beneath the blank surface of that face, Peter thinks he sees something flicker, a shadow, a ripple under the surface of a still, black ocean._

_ "It was far too late to save me," the girl whispers; her words overlap with another, stronger, unfamiliar voice; her pale figure and that of the two other women melts into a configuration, a rock formation, a nose, two lips, two eyes, dancing before Peter's vision amid a morass of quivering light spots._

_ "Mister? Oh, God, Mister, please. Wake up. Wake up, wake up, wake up, oh please…"_

_ Peter blinks the light spots away. The first thing he realises, and says aloud, is that "The heart's stopped beating."_

_ "What?"_

_Peter stares straight ahead, focusing his mind, consciously honing it, until the face that hovers before him takes on substance and becomes real. The light that falls across it is real light. The dusty wooden floor upon which he is slumped is a real floor. The mirrors, and the shiny barre, and the group of teenagers pressed together on the other side of the room, looking sick with terror – real. _

_ The shapeless mass covered over with the white coat, the coat that does not quite conceal a pair of limp feet in untied ballet shoes. That's real, too._

_ A young girl crouches in front of him, staring with blank, sweaty desperation into his eyes, trying to capture his gaze. Shiny dark hair, olive skin, braces on the teeth visible through her parted lips. _

_ "I'm Skye. Miz Kaminski sent me over to wake you up," she says thickly, glancing nervously off to one side; Peter, again, can't seem to turn his head, a faint ache beginning to creep inside it._

_ "Anyway, she wanted to see if you were okay, and I guess you are except for your arms and your face and stuff 'cause you're awake now, and I just wanted to say that if all this is 'cause of you and your wife, then please get him to stop, okay?"_

_ Peter tries to make sense of that garbled speech; fails. Why can't he sit up? Why won't his arms move when he wants them to? "Get…to stop…?"_

_ Skye hisses a frustrated breath through her teeth. "Doctor _Octopus._ Okay? He killed Amy. He's gonna kill all of us unless he gets to see his girlfriend, who I guess is your wife, and I don't wanna die so if you could just call her or something and make her come here, please do that, okay? Please?"_

_ "Amy…" Peter slides his eyes back towards the white coat, the ballet slippers._

_"_Look_ at me, man!" hisses Skye, anger momentarily subsuming fear. "Stay focused, okay? I know you're on something but I don't care, okay, and we don't have all that much time 'cause he says he's gonna keep killing us until he gets your wife back, right, so I figure, we all figure, you're probably the best guy to help us out right now."_

_ That idea almost makes Peter want to laugh; in fact, his head and his heart are so gossamer- light, so insubstantial, that he would laugh if only his ribs didn't ache every time he moved. Laugh long and loud and stupid. _

_ Why, even the fact that his arms don't seem to move as they should, don't seem to move at all, don't even seem connected to his body – even that seems utterly hilarious._

_ Morphine. Soothes the pain. Bathes it in golden splendor. Somewhere, down in the dark, it still hurts, but you can no longer recognise what it is you're supposed to feel when you feel pain._

_ But deep inside Peter Parker, deep inside that body and brain, even as the morphine races through his system, intricate neural nodes are working busily, seeking to combat the liquid dreams that infect his mind, make him want to drift away on its tides. Sanity returns, replaced by insanity, replaced by sleep; every attempt to focus is rewarded only momentarily, only when Peter stares at one point in the room and articulates it clearly in his mind. That is a table. A chair. A girl. It's always, always, a girl._

_ "I. Can't. Move," he says, slow as a novocaine patient._

_"Your arms are all broken," Skye says in a small voice. Gingerly, she touches one; Peter would not have known that she had done this if he hadn't seen her do it. "I think maybe he did it to you earlier. So I guess you can't fight him or anything, huh?" She sounds disappointed. As well she might, Peter thinks._

_ "Guess I can't." _Focus_, Parker! That is a table. That is a chair. That is a girl called Skye and those are a whole bunch of girls and boys like her who will die if you can't keep your mind from floating, floating in a soft black sea where there's no pain, no sensation at all, where all around is the smell of a woman's perfume and it could be flowers, and MJ smells like flowers and Doctor Octopus is in this room right here, right now, and he's going to kill all these kids unless he gets MJ back or _unless you stop him first, Parker!

_ "So what can you do?" Skye asks, her eyes pleading._

_What _can_ you do?_

_What?_

_"I can talk," Peter says, still painfully slow, slower even than his thoughts. "Yes. I can talk. _

_ "I've always been pretty good at talking."_

_Skye, to her credit, looks extremely doubtful._

****

_It waits. Sleeping. Inside a womb of reinforced steel. Cool and dark and silent. _

_ And still. Dark light gleaming off its cold metallic body, tracing and outlining its smooth black curves. Coiled like a dreaming snake. And it does dream. Oh, it does dream. It must. For every so often, every passing few minutes, a tremor - ever so slight, a nothing on the Richter Scale – wracks it, shakes it from the inside, holds it in the grip of a spasm. Its claws, folded in upon themselves, lightly scrape – _shhhhhhhrikkk_ – against the sides of the metal prison where it lies in wait. And then the spasm lets it go, and it collapses once more, into silence, into darkness and solitude._

_ But those movements. So slight you would never even know they were there. Occurring, now, with more frequency, less elapsed time between one and the other. The shudders, shivers, shakes. _

_ Bad dreams, perhaps. Or a machine's attempts to cry. To cry out._

****

All right. All right. I am calm now. I am rational and I am calm. I stare at the ceiling, trace the cracks with my eyes; my hands, at my sides, are still bunched into fists, but I feel sure that's only some sort of reflex muscular action. I'm calm. Centered. At peace.

Other people will handle it. Daredevil, probably. The X-Men. The Fantastic Four, or whoever. Strong people, capable people. People who are not currently locked up in madhouses awaiting a strong dose of sedative from a nurse with a face that could sour milk.

And when those strong, capable people get there, they will strongly and capably beat the living hell out of Otto. They will thrash him to within an inch of his life, because that's what you do. With supervillains.

And that's good, isn't it? I mean, that's what I'm supposed to want, right?

Vicariously, I can have my revenge. For what he did to me. For what he helped to turn me into. I can sit back and smile in satisfaction as he gets beaten to a pulp, safe in the knowledge that I'm all better now, and I'm good, and Peter's good, and Otto's bad, and everything bad I discovered inside me would never have existed at all if it weren't for him.

In a way, this should clinch it. This should be the final cut, the one that severs Otto and me forever. This should be the momentous occasion that convinces me that he's not human, that he's just a sick, rabid animal and I should just forget all about him.

Should be.

I close my eyes, open them again quickly. All I see behind the lids are the images that flashed across the screen: Otto's cold eyes and dead voice; Peter's grotesque smile and twisted limbs; the way the ballerina fell. The images grind into my throbbing head like a corkscrew; they sink like pellets of lead into the pit of my stomach, flipping it around, turning it inside out.

All I want is to be okay. And I want those kids to be okay, and I especially want Peter to be okay. But I want Otto to be okay, too.

Oh, and while I'm at it, Santa Claus, I'd also like a pony.

Jesus.

I can't believe he's done this.

I can't believe he's done this to them. To _me._

And I can't just leave this alone. I can't relax, I can't let some damn superheroes who don't, can't, have a clue as to what all of this really means, just stride in there and sort everything out with a strong right hook. I've got to be there. I have to be there. Nothing will work itself out, nothing will end, until I'm there.

Peter has saved my life more times than I can even remember off the top of my head. He saved me so often that I grew used to it, became complacent, convinced he could save me from everything, myself included. He was my foundation, my rock; so grounded and yet so buoyant, it seemed that nothing could possibly take him down. I never thought he'd be really helpless.

I never thought he'd ever be the one to need saving.

So, okay. Two men. Two men I can't break away from, not at this point, not when it really counts. Two men I need to get to, immediately and desperately.

It's always nice to have resolve. Damn shame it's not gonna get me anywhere. I test the straps at my side again, hauling my body weight against them; no dice. They don't even give an inch. It doesn't help that every time I exert myself, pressure clamps down around my head like a vice, tightening and tightening until I can hear the blood thumping in my ears, feel the skin cells actually constricting. And every time my head aches, my spinal column joins it in sympathy.

I slump back, eyes fixed on the ceiling, grinding my teeth, ready to cry out of sheer frustration. This is all _your_ fault, Otto. And as soon as I see you again, I swear to God, Brenda and I are gonna –

Brenda's not here. Brenda's not goddamn _here_.

Like losing a body part. Phantom sensations. I can still feel her – it – squirming inside my spine, writhing around to caress my face, my hair. I can still feel it, that metallic comfort, my artificial child. My artificial strength.

It's all been taken from me. It's all gone.

Except…

No…

A stillness sweeps over my limbs as the idea takes form inside my head.

I mean, it wouldn't work, I'm sure. And Peter might have been wrong; for all I know, they might well have removed her from the premises by now, or destroyed her completely.

And anyway, it wouldn't work. It's a stupid idea, and one I should probably just forget all about.

…But what if it _did _work?

I mean, just supposing.

What if it did?

What if the connection was really that strong?

What if _I_ am really that strong?

Maybe not such a stupid idea. Maybe.

I glance at the door; I can almost imagine I hear the nurse's footsteps outside, almost imagine I hear the whisper of air as the plunger is pushed down on a syringe, ridding the sedative of air bubbles. I won't wait for that. Can't wait.

I'm getting the hell out of here.

And I'm not doing it all alone, either.

I lie back again, watch the way the light plays across the ceiling. My breathing is loud and harsh inside my eardrums; watch the ceiling, MJ, slow it down, slow it down. Focus on the breath, on the intake and expulsion of air from your lungs. Close your eyes and see the inside of your body, the soft and shadowy organs, working like malleable machinery, beating and pulsing, pushing you onward.

So you've gone in. That's good. Now go out.

Out of this room, and down a corridor, a corridor you've never seen before but can see now, polished floor and white walls and chairs, and nurses and doctors passing by, clipboards under their white-coated arms, busy-busy; and down a flight of stairs, dipping and curving. Through more corridors, and I can see them now, so clearly, maybe not as they are but how _I _see them, which is far more important. I have no idea what they really look like, but the floor plan in my head twists and spirals, endless staircases curling back upon one another, leading upwards, downwards, both, a dizzying kaleidoscope formation of steps and archways, an Escher painting smelling of disinfected disease.

Yeah, not all that big on the realism, here. But considering I got shot in the head not long ago, I think it's pretty impressive that I can imagine anything at all.

My brain pulsates softly, reverberating through the delicate bones in my head, reminding me that I'm corporeal, that I can and do still feel pain. All the little cuts on my body, sustained from my forcible meeting with the nursing-home picture window, begin to tingle simultaneously. Fine. Let them. It's not like it's gonna stop me or anything.

I can hurt much worse than this.

I squeeze my eyes tighter, until little blotches of light start to appear in the darkness. A box. They'd have her locked away in a box, in a storage room somewhere. Somewhere dark and cold and quiet. She'd be in the box, a metal box probably, no light at all, lying there all still and silent. Dead snake. Or sleeping.

Wake up, Brenda.

Time to wake up, now.

Mama needs you.

****

_It waits. Unmoving, inanimate. That which animates it so far away. Such a distance._

_And another spasm. A trembling of its body, its amputated limb of a body, a wracking shiver. _

_ Its head, against the reinforced steel. Scraping. Quietly, quietly._

Shhhhhrrrrrikkkk.

_And limp again. And nothing._

****

I can feel her. Even now, I can still feel her; I can feel my spine undulating as if it wants to burst out of my body and slither over the floor towards her, to join up again, be one again.

Oh, hell, yes. I can feel her. I can feel her shiny black metal serpent body, feel it tremble against my mind's assault on its senses. I'm gonna make her get up. I'm gonna be her puppet-master.

I'm gonna make you get up, Brenda, you stupid, brainless, dumb _machine._

Me, with my weak, injured body and my addled brain; me with my stitches and my scars and my fragile bones encased in soft meat. You were designed to be close to indestructible. You were designed to do exactly what I tell you.

Now's the time when you're going to damn well _prove_ it.

Get up.

_It waits. Something inside it stirs; a life-force, someone else's life-force, entering into it, possessing it by degrees, imbuing it with the semblance of reality. The breath of life. _

_ Another shiver, this time convulsive, lasting much longer; a full-body tremor. _

Shhhrrrrrikkkk.

_And the claws, like a night-blooming flower, burst open._

I can hear the blood inside my head; my brain is a clenched fist within the confines of my skull. My teeth could be welded together, they're clamped so tightly. The only thing that cools me even slightly is the sweat I feel trickling down my temples, collecting in the curve of my spine, dampening the bandages wrapped around my torso. The veins in my arms pop, suddenly three-dimensional, as my muscles strain against the bands binding my wrists; my fingernails bite into the flesh of my palms, and I think I feel the sting of suddenly opened wounds; doesn't matter, doesn't matter.

Get up.

Get up.

Get

Up.

_Deaf, blind, it responds the way an animal responds, instinctively and without question. Guided only by the force that brings it life, driven to do only that which makes it functional. Its body shakes, quivers, a minor earthquake, then stills, rigid, vibrating with energy._

_ Its claws tap gently on the inside of its metal prison._

_Tap._

_Tap._

_Tap._

_They curve, ever so slightly. And they scrape, a cat at a back door, wanting to be let in. _

Shhrrrrrriiikk.

****

Get up.

Get up, and come to me.

Get up, break out, and come to me.

You know you can do it. _I_ know you can do it. And you know that I know.

And you will do it. You will do it for me. You will do it _because I tell you to do it._

A flash, a lightning-strike illumination, in my brain: Otto, silhouetted by the side of a road at night, telling me that I control the tentacle, though I do not know it yet. Otto, telling me that I must gain the upper hand over the thing; telling me that I have to issue repeated commands until it finally capitulates, until it submits to me.

Break you.

Bend you.

Bend you to my will.

Get up, break out, and come to me.

My back arches, the spinal cord twists; my mouth falls open to drag air into my burning lungs; thick needles stab into my skull; my fists grind down into the sweat-sodden bedclothes, and I feel my eyes roll into the back of my head. God knows what this must look like to anyone monitoring the security cameras, but there isn't enough room in my head for thoughts of anything like that, thoughts of anything else, anything at all. I go deeper, deeper inside myself, in order that I may bring her out.

Get up.

Break out.

And come to me.

_The claws curve inwards, roll themselves up into a ball, into a steel fist. They clench. The long black body is rigid with tension._

_And shoots forward at unstoppable speed, hitting the side of the box with such force that sparks fly._

_ The heavy slam of great force being applied; the shriek of metal on metal._

_It draws back, body concertina'ed, pauses a moment or two. _

_And barrels forward again._

_Slam._

_Again._

_Slam._

_Again._

_Slam._

_The rhythm of the attacks grows steadier, more insistent, urgent. Yes. It will get up. It will break out. It will come to her._

_Slam._

Come on. You can do it.

Do it.

Do it.

Do it because I tell you to.

_Slam._

_The metal bends. It curves, bulges outward, straining to hold against the tentacle's savage assault. _

_Slam._

_The dent widens._

_Slam._

_The metal groans in protest._

_Slam._

_Groans._

_And gives._

_A sound like a tin can being shredded apart, echoing through the empty storage room. The claws, unfurled, scrabble at the flower of burst metal that they have just now created; they tug at the curling edges, widening the hole, and, pushed forward by its own momentum, the tentacle slithers through, drops down, past too many shelves to count, and lands, gracelessly, on the floor._

My eyes spring open wide, sightless; I can see her, I can feel her, feel her release, the sudden lapse in tension. It's déjà vu all over again, the glory days of BrendaVision; I don't need any damn eye-patch to see what she sees, not now.

So you've gotten out. Okay. Good girl. But it isn't over just yet.

You still have to get up.

You still have to come to me.

_The tentacle writhes drunkenly on its back, moving with jerky, flopping motions, like a stranded fish. One final pitch and roll, one final spasmodic lurch, and its open claws touch the tile, digging downwards, straining for balance. They slip- slide, the clicking sound of their scrabbling for purchase frantic in the dead, still air._

_ The claws flex, crouch, distribute their weight more evenly; they rock slightly, still crouched, a gleaming black tarantula; and they straighten, with timidity, then with confidence. They stand. Brenda stands, long black body trailing behind her claw-legs, circuit-ridden umbilical cord._

Tak; _the sound of one claw venturing cautiously forward, as if to feel its way;_ tak tak, _and two more claws go forth, pulling the body one step away from the sheltering shadow of the towering shelves; a pause, a lull, a gathering of strength, a drawing of a breath – and a minor explosion, a flurry of motion, a skittering and a scuttling, as Brenda dashes across the floor, claw-legs racing over the tiles and thin whiplike torso lashing excitedly behind it; and on its own momentum it smashes into the door, blind, but not deterred because _she _is not deterred –_

- Attagirl attagirl keep going now keep going that's it that's right don't let me down now God my head my back my head the _pain_ –

_And it leaps, leaps up in an undulating arc, swaying dangerously as it balances itself, oh-so-precariously, on its severed, clawless end; it stiffens, tries to stabilise its center of gravity, as two of the claws wrap themselves around the doorknob. The other three grope sightlessly around the handle, finger-walk down, listening, feeling as the sensory input through the claw-tips feeds them information, tells them, yes, this is the grain of painted wood, this is the smoothness of unbroken metal, this is – _

_ The lock. Yes. The claws delicately trace the wavering pattern of the keyhole, feeing out its rough and jagged edges. They slip down, slip in, twist._

_ Click._

_The claws haul back on the knob, drop down to the floor, and speed through the door as it swings open, bangs shut._

_ And it doesn't stop, doesn't pause for a moment, relentless and driven, borne on the wings of its owner's desire, following her will and her will alone. It clings to the shadows cobwebbed in the low corners; melts into them, and the white-coated interns and orderlies and nurses and doctors see nothing, next to nothing, a twitch in the corner of their eye that is gone as soon as it appears. It scuttles down darkened corridors and through a red door; scrambles up the echoing fire-escape stairwell; winds its flexible body around the railing, hauling itself up and humping forward on its belly, before falling back to earth, back to its claw-feet, and skittering neatly through the open door at the top, into the gleaming white hallway._

_ Past leather-shoed feet hurrying this way and that, feet belonging to people too busy or too sad or too mad to look down; past the rubber-soled feet of the girl's nurse, striding down this corridor on her way to the elevator, one hand thrust into her pocket, caressing the metal syringes she has only just now retrieved from the medical department. Brenda does not see her, does not feel her, and the nurse returns the favor. _

_ Through a narrow archway, and greeted by another flight of stairs; the claws hop one step, two at a time, three; scuttle up the unpainted wall of the stairwell, up the corresponding archway leading onto the next floor, and onto the ceiling, driving the points of the claws deep into the white plaster. The world turned upside-down, the tentacle slithers across the ceiling, its body tensed, taut, pressed flat against the surface, that it might not hang down, might not attract attention._

_ Below it, the world spins with life; the corridor lined with waiting visitors, teeming with hospital staff on their way to and from the sick and the needy. Brenda hunches up, on the ceiling, as though considering her next move; as though she thinks for herself. She scuttles across the surface, quicker than the eye, and clings to the corner, waiting for a lull in the activity below. Waiting for a window of opportunity._

_ The woman in black, seated next to the girl's room, tosses down her magazine, sighs, checks her watch, and stands up, carefully staking her claim to her seat by draping her coat across it. She walks away, vanishing down the stairwell Brenda has just climbed._

_ The tentacle wastes no time; it relaxes its grip on the plaster, and falls to the ground inches away from the girl's door. Waves of desire blast it, fill it, tug it along as though attached to an invisible wire; she is close, so close, and the severed stump that terminates Brenda's body seems to crackle, to ache, almost._

_ The tentacle hops up onto its end, flattens itself back against the doorframe, away from the eyes of any who might pass. It clamps its claws together, cranes its swanlike head out towards the lock; opens slightly, and delicately, feeling its way once more, finds the aperture, twists and fumbles, twists and rattles and shakes, until it is rewarded with a 'click'._

_ It leans against the door, pushing with all its weight; the door opens, and it tumbles through, falling gracelessly to the ground, rolling, and alighting neatly upright on claw-tip as the door swings shut._

_ If the tentacle could see, and if it were possessed of the ability to comprehend what it saw, it would see a head swathed in bulky bandages, pressed flat to the forehead with sweat. It would see thin white arms, punctured by IV needles and straining so hard against a pair of rubber straps that blood has been drawn from the wrists. It would see a green eye, misted over with tears of agony, staring at it with an excitement, a triumph, bordering on delirium._

"Welcome back, baby!" I burst out, before I can stop myself.

I did it. I mean she did it. I mean I did it. It was worth all the pain – the continuing pain; just the effort of keeping her standing upright is costing me dearly – because she's here, she's waiting right there in the doorway, waiting for me to give her her next order. Brenda. My tentacle. My baby…

Only it's funny, because she doesn't really seem all that much like my baby, my Brenda, the living breathing thing that clung so close to my body all these months. Looking at her now, an animated puppet I move with my mind, I can still feel an attachment, but it's like an attachment to a childhood toy. I don't feel a deep connection to her – to it. I don't feel the warm rush of love I once did for it, the love I had for what it could do for me, for the way it seemed to need me.

It's just an object now. It's not my baby. It's not little May. It's just…something I can manipulate. Something I loved once, and can use now. And that's really all.

It may not be real, but I can still feed it lies. It will believe me. It has no choice. And, though I feel vaguely fake, vaguely phoney, I realise I feel no guilt. "Okay, Brenda," I say, licking the sweat off my lips. "Okay. You see that red light there in the corner?" I nod to the ceiling, where the crimson eye of the surveillance monitors stares down, unblinking. "You're gonna do something for me. You're gonna climb up there, and you're gonna bring that camera down, all right? You're gonna smash it down, onto the floor, so it doesn't work any more."

I didn't used to have to command her this way. Not with words. She used to be part of me. We used to be a team. A pang of loss, through the veil of physical pain. Things shouldn't have had to change. Things shouldn't have –

Shut up, MJ.

Brenda, get your ass up there.

I swear, if the thing could salute, it would. It scampers over the floor, jumps up onto the wall, shredding wallpaper, stabbing holes. It claws its way up, into the corner, and winds itself sinuously around the black box of the security camera. Its claws envelop the lens, blocking the red light from view; it shakes, backward and forward, down and up, and I hear a squeal of metal and circuitry as it starts to come loose, as wires tear like tissue. One last wrench, and both the camera and the tentacle come crashing down to Earth, Brenda leaping free as the device sputters, sparks, and dies.

I grin, and cry out, as hot blood shoots past my eyes and lances through my brain. Brenda stumbles, staggers, almost falls; I panic, grasp frantically at whatever control I can maintain. The pain in my head and back turns in on itself and goes under, deliberately buried. The tentacle manages to steady itself.

"Okay, baby," I call to her, the honeyed words a straight-up, through-the-teeth lie, "Get on over here now. Get up here and undo these straps, okay? Right now."

Brenda obediently rushes over to the bed, hops up, alights on the clean white sheets before I have time to take another breath. She slithers up towards me, and I watch her, wondering how it is that I didn't notice up until now how reptilian, how utterly inhuman, her movements really are. Her slick body brushes my skin as she cranes over my left wrist, and I suppress a shudder.

Her claws fumble with the rubber strap, shred at it until it thins; I pull my arm forward, feel the strap split, the release of pressure around my arm. I undo the other strap and sit up straight for what feels like the first time in days. The sudden motion was, it turns out, not a good idea; my head swims as blood and oxygen race each other through my veins, towards my skull. I ignore it, tear the IVs out of my arms, avoiding the sight of my own blood as it spurts out of the thin, clear tubes. I throw the covers aside, and leap athletically out of bed.

The minute my feet touch the ground, my stomach roils, my throat fills with bile; spots of black and white dance frenetically before my eyes, and my head is so light it could float off my shoulders at any second. Gagging, trembling fingers pressed to the sides of my skull, I tumble to the ground, landing right on the point of my hip.

I feel something tear, some soft pink tissue around my spine, perhaps, some intricate metal stitching; feel it tear, feel the trickling sensation pooling around my spinal column, electrified already with white fire, juddering up my vertebrae and into the folds of my already aching brain. So intense, so overwhelming, I can't even scream; I jam my fist into my mouth, bite down hard on the knuckles, can do nothing but wait for it to pass.

Slowly, I twist around, off my side, onto my stomach; the coolness of the floor slightly eases the scorching sensation in my belly. I stare straight ahead, past the dust mites and balls of lint, towards the tiny crack of light visible from beneath the door. Stretching my arms over my head, I curl my fingers into claws, imitative of Brenda, who 'watches' from beside the door. Grinding my teeth together, feeling the sweat running into my nose, my eyes, my mouth, I dig my nails deep into the linoleum, and haul myself forwards, propelling myself as best I can with my weak legs. _Crawl, bitch, crawl!_ I scream at myself, eyes stinging with tears; I have to be merciless now, there's just no damn time to be kind.

I'm so close, so close now I can almost brush the doorframe with my fingertips; my breath grates in my ears, is all I can hear. Which would account for my failing to catch the sound of the key in the lock until it's much too late, until the door is open and the nurse is standing there, in the doorway, busily fiddling with two syringes.

"All right, Ms. Watson, what I've got right here is your dosage of painkillers for today, plus a nice sedative to keep you ca – " She looks up, and she sees me, staring up at her from the floor. Her eyes widen. "What the hell is – ?"

She never gets to finish that sentence, because Brenda rears up, wraps herself around the nurse's torso and neck, and brings her crashing to the ground, the syringes scattering. The nurse screams, more out of rage than fear, from the sound of it; her shriek is abruptly cut short as Brenda unsheathes her claws, holds them, crooked, just beneath her chin, at the soft flesh of her throat.

Drawing in breaths at a painfully slow rate, to match the sound of the heartbeat in my ears, I reach out, snatch up the syringes, and crawl over to where the nurse lies, frozen and rigid, only her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides.

I hold up my shaking hands, one syringe clasped in each. "Which one is the sedative," I demand, "And which one is the painkiller? Don't lie," I warn her, and Brenda snaps her claws emphatically at the woman's face. "I'll know."

Her breath coming in short gasps, the nurse flicks her eyes at the syringe in my right hand, licks her lips. "That one. That one's the…That's the painkiller. The other's the sedative."

"Don't lie," I repeat, my voice thick inside my head, muffled by the pain.

"I'm not," she whispers, staring down at the claws, inches away from her face. "I'm not lying."

I grunt, flop down, curl around onto my side, facing away from her; dipping my head forward, I grab the sleeve of my puke-green hospital pyjamas with my teeth and haul it up past my left elbow. A congealed red dot of blood, a souvenir from the IV needle, mars the skin in the crook of my arm. I bite off the cap of the syringe in my right hand, slip my fingers and thumb around the plunger, and drive it as deep as I can into the center of the red dot. My thumb sinks down on the plunger. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I think I can feel it already, the warm numbness, spreading through me, masking the pain until some more convenient time.

Exhaling, I shut my eyes, pull out and drop the syringe. Leaning on my right elbow, I lever myself up to a sitting position, the motion much more fluid now, my body beginning to feel more like human flesh again and not a creaky, badly-oiled machine. One palm pressed to the floor, I haul myself awkwardly to a standing position, wobbling only a little. I look down at the nurse, whose eyes are filled with fear.

A brief memory of the sour joy that used to swallow me at times like this, times when ordinary people, normal people, would look at me and feel all their carefully-constructed sense of security slipping away. A whisper of a time when I could call myself an aberration and feel some kind of pride in how much they hated me, how much I could hate myself. When Otto was by my side and together we were more than human – we were supervillains, and our life was better than real life.

The memory doesn't last, and I don't linger on it too long.

"Sorry about this," I say to the nurse, and sink the syringe containing the sedative into her arm. Her eyes grow huge, then flicker closed, and her breathing becomes slow and even.

Kneeling down beside her, I quickly strip off her uniform, wishing there were some more dignified way to accomplish this. I still feel a little logy, a little lightheaded. A good old-fashioned shot of adrenaline would've gone down nicely, too, I think, as I slip off the pyjama top and shrug my way into the nurse's white smock. Would've made a nice chaser for the painkillers.

I guess, at this stage, you just take whatever you can get.

****

**It's hard to tell, but I believe it may rain again soon.**

**The sky beyond the window is the color of tarnished pearl, and seems closer now that it has ever been. At any moment, the first few drops will begin to spatter against the glass, and the whole world will be drowned.**

** I hope there will be no problems transporting Mary Jane to this location. I know she can be wilful when she wants to be. More than anyone, I know that. Surely, though, she must see that this will all work out for the best, that the ultimate purpose of all I have done is that we may be together again, just as we were. **

** A fly circles around the room, a distant black dot. Everything is sealed; I don't know how it found its way inside. It buzzes across the ceiling, dips down, and settles on the covered form, skittering over the white cloth.**

** Perhaps (it occurs to me) Mary Jane doesn't know about the ballerina. A cheering thought. Perhaps she does not need to know. She probably wouldn't like it if she knew; things wouldn't be the same between us, and I want everything to be as it was…**

** "See anything out there?"**

**I turn away from the window, scan the room for the source of this casual query. My eye falls upon the Parker boy, who gazes up at me, one eye almost swollen shut, arms twisted and lifeless as dead tree branches. I note with no small amount of satisfaction that his pupils are shrunken to pinpoints; the morphine is still coursing through his system, much as he may try to fight it. He will go under again shortly, of that I have no doubt. He would be a pitiful sight, had I any pity for this man whatsoever. **

** I turn back to the window, watch the miniature street below, watch the skies. At any moment, an armored car could pull up with her inside; at any moment, a voice distorted by bullhorn feedback could tell me she is on her way. At any moment, anything could happen. **

** That voice pipes up again, its tone deceptively pleasant, in spite of the slight, drugged slur. "I mean, any sign that they're gonna give you what you want?"**

** Involuntarily, my lip curls. "They will give me what I want, Mr. Parker," I respond coldly. "Don't worry about _that_."**

** He shifts uncomfortably, pushing his back further up against the wall. "It's just that, realistically speaking, it's kind of unlikely. You know the NYPD has a policy of not negotiating with terrorists."**

** "What a coincidence. _I_ have a policy of not negotiating with the NYPD." I exhale softly through my teeth, shake my head. "No. My demand is not open to discussion. Not with them." I flick my eyes across to him, sheer distaste preventing me from looking at him directly. "And not with you."**

** As far as I am concerned, this effectively ends the conversation. I have nothing to say to this boy, nothing I wish to either share with or gain from him. All I desire for the moment is silence. This is something the dancers at least seem to understand. **

** Parker, however, for reasons I can only assume are either suicidal or drug-induced, does not appear to comprehend this.**

** "Actually, Doc," he says quietly, "I think you kind of owe me a little 'discussion'."**

** I whip back around. I stare mutely at the boy. The very idea…the very _notion_…at this time, in this place, when it should be only too clear that he holds no cards whatsoever –**

** I stride across the room, past the students, who visibly flinch at my proximity; past my own reflection in the mirror, a dark blur I dare not look upon directly; past the cloth-covered and unmoving form on the ground; and finally stand before him, staring down at him. Barely alive. Barely human. Barely even worth a response.**

** Why I choose to give him one rather than simply sending him to join Amy Lowell, I can't imagine. "I owe you _nothing_, boy," I hiss, and one tentacle curls threateningly around his broken shoulders. "Nothing but pain. Nothing but loss."**

** "If you're so sure you're gonna get her back," Parker says, calmly, infuriatingly calmly, "Then I don't see what it is exactly that you've lost. Or what you've got to blame me for." **

** "You seem to be implying something, Mr. Parker. If I were you, I wouldn't attempt to imply anything right now."**

** "If you were me…" he says in a musing tone that makes me want to tear his spinal cord out through his breastbone. "Yeah. If you were me. Maybe that's pretty much what this is all about, huh?"**

** "You're speaking nonsense," I mutter, turning away.**

**"Oh, am I?" he slings back. "Sorry. Morphine doesn't generally do all that much for my conversational skills." He glances down at the floor. "No. I guess I was just thinking…"**

** While you still can.**

**"…Thinking," he continues, his chatter apparently interminable despite the hoarseness of his voice, "That it's kind of funny, you know? There's you and there's me. And we're, well – " He gives a snort of laughter. "We're pretty different people. I don't believe we've ever really had all that much in common. A few months ago I was living my life and you were living yours, and then one day, for no reason I can make out – bam. We collided somehow. Over her. Over MJ."**

** "Mary Jane," I correct him without thinking. I have never liked the diminutive form of her name. It lacks dignity. **

** He shrugs, or at least attempts to do so; runs his tongue over cracked lips. "Whatever, whatever....And it's so weird. All of this is happening, not because of her, no, not really - but because you and I are, well, we're just a couple of selfish bastards, really. All along, it's been all about, like – 'choose me, MJ! Choose me! Make me happy! Make me complete!' We both want her on our separate teams. And that's really pretty sad for a couple of guys who're supposedly all grown up..."**

** "If you have a point, Mr. Parker," I say brusquely, unwilling to give these morphine-addled ramblings the opportunity to sink into my thoughts, "Then I advise you to make it."**

** "A point?" he asks wearily. "I don't know. Just that I guess we've got at least that one thing in common, is all."**

** "I see." I turn back around, folding my arms behind my back. "Do you hope to gain me as some sort of ally, Mr. Parker?" I ask quietly. "Win my trust, perhaps? Do you imagine that acknowledging a common interest between the two of us will induce in me some desire to spare your life? Do you want to be my confidante, Mr. Parker? My friend? Don't bother." I turn back around, intending to return to the window. "As far as I'm concerned, you were a dead man the moment I laid eyes on Mary Jane Watson."**

** "Trust me, Ock…" The boy drifts off, shivers slightly; his eyes roll, swim out of focus, snap back again. He goes on, voice wavering only a little. "Trust me, I _don't_ want to be your friend. And if you hadn't smashed up my arms like a wineglass at a Jewish wedding, I'd get up right this second and kick your ass up around your ears."**

** I almost smile at this. The arrogance of a frightened child.**

**"The only point I was trying to make – and, hey, you can feel free to ignore this if you want – was that, even though we've got MJ in common, I think that's pretty much it," he croaks. "Because the funny thing about being with MJ and then losing her – as you may have noticed by now – is that, after she's gone, you start to think a lot about the way things are, the way things were. You sort of take stock of yourself. You wonder what the hell kind of man you were to let someone like her leave your life. And you know what I've concluded? What I've realised? I just want her to be happy. That's all. With me or without me. That," he finishes, gazing up at me with a vicious gleam in his drug-darkened eyes, "Is the difference between you and me."**

** I fold my arms, tilt my head to one side. "And is that supposed to signify some sort of moral triumph on your part?" I enquire. "That you are willing to relinquish her, whereas I am not?" **

** "I can't 'relinquish' her," Parker slings back, "Because I don't _own _her. I never did."**

** "Indeed?" My tentacles extend silently across the room, dancing across the shadows. My hands, trapped inside my folded arms, clench slowly into fists. "What an interesting statement. Coming as it does from a man who married a fashion model."**

** "What does that have to do with anything?" **

**"And there was never a time," I go on, the sarcasm sour on the tip of my tongue, "there was never a time when you would take her to a party, or introduce her to your friends, and feel a sense of pride in ownership. Never _once_ did you observe other men looking at her and think to yourself, 'she's all mine'. Never once trotted her out, showed her off to others, watched the looks of envy and lust flitting across their faces, and that never made some secret part of you feel truly marvellous about yourself. No, of course not. Never. Not _you_."**

** Success. Parker is silent, his head bowed. **

**"You turned her into an object, Mr. Parker, every bit as much as you accuse me of doing so," I continue. "But to me, she was never that. No." I shake my head solemnly. "Never an object."**

** His head snaps up; his eyes flash impotent fury. "Never an object? To _you_?" He laughs, a sharp and uncontrolled falsetto that sets my teeth on edge. "Oh, my _God_, Octavius. Oh my God, oh my God. Oh ho ho…What a total, utter, big, fat, lying hypocrite you are."**

** The dancers look nervous, as well they should. One of them, a coltish little thing with lank hair and braces, hisses through her teeth.**

** "I mean, _seriously _now. To you, she what _was _she if not an object? Or maybe I should say, _subject?"_ **

** The word stings, hitting rather too close to the bone. **

**"A science experiment," he goes on venomously. "Something to play with for a while, something to take apart and fix up again the way you wanted it. You didn't give a damn how she felt. You still don't, not really. All that mattered was how she made _you_ feel, how good you felt when you could look at her and say, 'I made her that way'." **

** He is wrong. He is utterly, utterly wrong. He doesn't know me. He doesn't know a damn thing about me. Us.**

** The boy is gathering momentum; flecks of froth jet from his lips, and a crazed look is entering his eyes. I believe the second wave of morphine is about to break upon him. I will be glad when it does.**

** "Maybe I made her into an object, yes. Yes, in fact, you're probably one hundred per cent, two hundred per cent, totally and unequivocally cor-_rect_ about that one, Doc. But so did you. And all that this probably means is that neither one of us deserves her." He laughs again, the unsteady sound threatening to break his throat apart. "Which gives us another thing in common, doesn't it?"**

** I stare into his eyes; he stares back, no fear in their drugged depths. To my surprise, I am the one who breaks the contact, who looks down at the floor, frowning, and I don't know why. His words itch under my skin, burn like tick bites. He is completely wrong, of course. Completely. Mary Jane is not an object to me. Certainly not.**

** I mean, yes, naturally, I took pride in my work. Of course I did. I would watch her and think of all that I had done to make her this way, and I would feel very pleased, very satisfied with myself, with my supreme accomplishment. Observing her as she progressed was – it was a joy. **

** And if I am not willing to give her up, then it follows that that is because I want what is best for her. And I know that I am what is best for her. She would not survive without me.**

** She would be nothing without me.**

**(And yet she left for Arizona. Left, alone, in the car. Left without looking back.)**

**She needs me. Even if I did let her go, such an action would only hurt her.**

**She _needs _me. She told me so. Everyone but you and me, she said, can go to hell. **

**You're the only one, she said, who didn't throw me away.**

**But I'll be damned if I'll tell _him_ any of this.**

**"At one point," I say slowly, as though under some mesmerist's spell – if he would stop looking at me that way, I'm sure I would be able to keep my own counsel much more effectively - "At one point, I considered her nothing more than a subject, yes."**

** "And now?" he challenges. "What is she to you now, Ock? Huh? You want her, we've established that. But _why_?"**

** I pause, assimilating the question, finding it a good one. Technically, I no longer require the girl for anything. The experiment was a successful one; my hypothesis, long since proven, to myself if to no one else. An experiment drawn out past its natural termination date is an experiment that is ultimately doomed to failure. Technically, I should have ended it long ago.**

** Technically. **

**"If you do not instinctively understand _why_, Mr. Parker," I respond without forethought, "Then you deserve her even less than I thought."**

** Parker makes an attempt at shrugging again; his crushed shoulders are satisfactorily, reassuringly, pathetic-looking. There is nothing he can do to me. No possible way that he can hurt me. Sticks and stones…**

** "Hey, I just said so myself, didn't I?" he says quietly. "But you're probably right. I _don't _understand why. I love Mary Jane…"**

** I snort derisively. **

**"I do," he insists. "More than you could probably imagine. I'd do anything for her – God, I _have _done anything for her. But if you're asking me, would I kill for her? Kill a little fifteen-year-old girl for her? Then no, Ock. I've gotta say, no, I wouldn't." His teeth glitter from behind his lips, pulled back in a snarl. "Call me stupid, call me undeserving, but that I refuse to 'understand'."**

** I smile. "And that, Mr. Parker," I whisper, "That is the _real _difference between us." I rise up over him, tentacles enclosing him like metal tree trunks. I lean down, staring him in the eye, absorbing the delicious taste of his helpless hatred, and breathe, "And, for her sake, I would do it again, and again, and again. And if it comes to that…"**

** I turn my head slowly, cast a deliberately cold eye across the room, at the petrified students.**

** "If it comes to that, I _will_."**

**Such a statement – dramatic and portentous – generally, in my experience, ends any argument. But Parker stares me down, refuses to break my gaze, and despite the darkened lenses that shield me, I feel oddly vulnerable, as if I am being actively attacked.**

** "Yeah. And wouldn't Mary Jane just be so _proud _of you?" he whispers.**

**I rear back, slowly and steadily, keeping my eyes trained upon him until the moment I turn away. I do not go back to the window this time. I lean against a nearby wall instead, my face turned from his sight, eyes closed, trying to gather my scattered thoughts into a cohesive whole.**

** He will not influence me in any way. Not in the slightest. I value his opinion less than that of anyone in the world, less than I value the opinion of the students, watching me as though I were a dangerous animal; or that of Madame Kaminski, a disgust more potent than any loathing etched upon her face; or that of my father, that despicable old viper whose brainless guffaws seem to resound through the corridors of my head.**

** She will understand. The boy does not, and Kaminski does not, and nor will anybody else. Fine. That is something that I am entirely used to. But she, _she_ will understand. When she gets here. When, not if. And it will be soon. Soon enough to prevent me from doing, once more, what I will have to do. **

** The fly lifts up into the air again, circles Amy Lowell's small body like a tiny black vulture. I can barely even remember killing her. I can't even remember what it felt like. Were it not for that constant visual reminder, I would have serious doubts as to whether or not it had happened at all.**

** It doesn't matter. **

**Don't think about it.**

** Mary Jane will make everything all right.**

****

One step forward, and my stomach lurches. At any given moment I could throw up.

The pain is gone, mostly; all that remains is a very dull ache in the side of my head, running right along the wire stitching that curls back from my temple and around my ear. Inching carefully down the corridor, I hide the scar as best I can with my hair, holding my head down so the black curtain covers my face. I press close to the wall, balancing myself against it with one hand; my feet wobble, don't respond exactly the way I want them to. After the silence of my room, the noise in the hall seems amplified, a series of sonic booms erupting in my ears every time someone passes by, or speaks, or rustles a piece of paper.

Only a matter of time, now. Only a matter of time before someone in the control room notices that the cameras are out; before the nurse recovers consciousness; before someone recognises me.

On the chair outside my room, I spot someone's gray overcoat, folded neatly on the seat; I snatch it up, pull it on, turn up the collar, shove my hands into the pockets. Beneath the baggy white nurse's uniform, Brenda, looped around the top of my thigh, softly digs her claws in: a reminder to get moving, as if I needed one.

Draw another breath. Hold it in, keep it safe in your burning lungs. And let it out.

Keep walking, MJ. Stay on your feet. The staircase is right ahead.

****

_Sister Guiterrez walks back down the corridor, Styrofoam cup of steaming black coffee clutched against her chest, warming her heart. As she approaches Mary Jane's door, she stops and stares down at her chair, lips parting in protest as a spike of anger rises up inside her. Her coat has been stolen._

_ She looks up and down the rows of chairs lining the hall; no sign of it. It's gone. She got up for fifteen minutes to get one lousy cup of coffee, after sitting down to wait for Heaven knows how long just on the off-chance that she could talk to a girl whose mind may be in such a state of disarray that it wouldn't even make a difference anyway – and her coat is stolen._

_ Though she knows she ought not to say such a thing, Sister Guiterrez exhales and mutters: "The hell with it."_

_ She downs her coffee in two strong gulps, and grimaces; turns out it's horrible, and hardly worth the loss of a coat. She turns, and heads off down the nearby flight of stairs. _

****

The wind slashes at my face, howls past the rows of neatly parked cars; my new rubber-soled shoes slap wetly against the parking lot tarmac. I guess it rained last night. It's only overcast now, but at any moment there might be another downpour, which would really just make my day complete.

A shiver of pain ratchets down my spine, slices through my limbs. White heat inside my head. I slip, stumble, am saved from falling only by seizing hold of a car door handle. Brenda, tensed around my thigh, slackens as I momentarily lose control; tautens again as I haul myself back onto my feet.

Hell. I can't drive like this. The painkillers are making me sleepy, and the pain they're supposed to be killing is making me weak. My muscles feel loose and flabby, and it's enough of an effort trying to get them to work for me without the added exertion of keeping Brenda active. In my condition, even if I manage to steal a car – and even if I manage to get past the two burly security guards who, I note, are flanking the gates – I'd be able to drive for about five minutes before crashing into a ditch.

I could hitchhike, maybe. "'Scuse me, sir or ma'am, I hope you don't mind giving me a lift to the scene of this hostage crisis in NYC. Oh, don't worry, it won't be dangerous or anything. Heh, see, it's a funny story: I'm actually a supervillain and this whole thing is happening because there's this _other _supervillain who - "

Nah.

Catch the bus? Too slow, and too much risk of being recognised.

Just as I'm contemplating actually attempting to walk all the way there, a twittering car-alarm beep resounds a couple of cars away. I look up to see a small, fed-up-looking figure in a nun's habit crossing the lot, keys in one hand. I glance back across at the car, and instantly make my mind up.

I drop down to the ground, slithering on my belly underneath the two cars that block my way. The smell of wet concrete and petrol exhaust fills my lungs, and by the time I pull myself up into a crouching position next to the nun's car, the front of the nurse's white uniform is covered in filth. Oh, well, it's not like anyone will be scandalised if I show up in less than pristine condition.

At my command, Brenda slips out from under my dress, scrabbles her way up the side of the car, scraping the paint job with her claws. As soon as she's finished picking the lock, I quickly open the door, slip into the back, and huddle down behind the driver's seat, curled into a tight ball. Brenda slides through after me and winds herself around my shoulders, in a manner I used to find comforting.

The car smells of mints and cheap hair conditioner; the cracked leather seating creaks under me as I shift slightly, trying to cushion my spine. I lean my head back against the door, eyes shut, swallowing; my throat is so dry that even a drawn breath feels like razor blades scraping my windpipe.

The sound of footsteps crunching the gravel outside; a key fiddling in the lock, and a blast of cold air as the door opens and shuts. The nun scoots over to the driver's seat and adjusts her rear-view mirror, reflected inside it, I see myself as she sees me, hunched up, wild-eyed, feral. She gasps, turns around; I leap up onto my knees and wind an arm around her throat, pressing my hand to her mouth.

"Please don't scream," I whisper in her ear, "Or try to hurt me or anything like that, okay? Because I don't wanna hurt you. I'm not _gonna_ hurt you. You know who I am, right?"

She nods. I look down at her, tilt my head. She looks kind of familiar. Maybe I knew her, before this all began, ten thousand years ago.

"Okay. Good. Can I take my hand away? I mean, can I trust you to be quiet and not yell?"

Another nod; her eyes are softening, the terror draining out of them. I remove my hand and sit back, but send Brenda to curl around the back of the driver's seat, craning over the nun's shoulder, just as a reminder.

"What I need for you to do," I continue quietly, "Is to get me past the guards and drive me into the city. I have to get as close as possible to this ballet school – "

"The Julienne Academy," she interrupts. "Yes. You are trying to get to Doctor Octopus, aren't you?"

I fold my arms, lean back in my seat. "Yeah. Kind of." I shake my head. "Not just to him, though, I mean. My husband is there, too, and a bunch of kids, and I think I should try to stop what's going on, maybe…"

"You do not sound as if you have a plan," she says gently, and I could swear I've heard that soft Spanish voice before. "And what you are doing, the risk you are taking, it is a very dangerous one."

"Yeah, no kidding. And, hey, look, I didn't ask for your opinion, okay, Sister?" I say irritably. "I don't have that much time, so I'd appreciate it if you just started driving, like, right now."

The nun clams up, eyes flickering to Brenda, and twists the key in the ignition. The car purrs into life, and I close my eyes briefly as my stomach lurches with the sudden motion.

"You had better hide yourself," she mutters as we approach the gates.

I shrug off the loose-fitting coat and drape it over myself, scrunching up tightly in the backseat and doing my best not to move. Before the world disappears under a blanket of gray cloth, I think I catch a look of annoyance flash through the nun's eyes. Justifiable, I suppose.

I hold my breath as the car rolls to a stop; muffled voices exchange bland words. In lieu of breath, my heart thumps in my empty throat. For all I know, she's selling me out right now; any second, and the cloth could be whisked away and I'll lie here blinking like an idiot as the guards grab me and haul me off to the deepest, darkest cell in Ravencroft, and Peter'll be all alone, and Otto, well, he won't know what the hell to think, and those kids –

The voices break off, and underneath me, the car grinds back into motion. The impact of a speed bump shudders through me, and then there's nothing but silence, nothing but smooth passage.

"We are past the gates," I hear the nun say. "You can come out now."

I toss off the coat, sit back up, leaning against the back of the passenger seat. "Thanks," I mumble.

The nun shrugs, casts a look back at me through the rear view mirror. "You are the one who stole my coat," she says coolly.

I look down at it. "Oh. Yeah, guess I am. Sorry." I fold it up and pass it forward into the passenger seat.

Her expression softens. "That is all right."

Again, that familiar feeling; it's really starting to bother me. I squint my eyes a little, turn my head this way and that. "I don't know you, do I?" I ask.

She flicks her gaze back to me. "I do not know. _Do_ you know me?" she asks simply.

I shrug. "If it's from my past, then probably not. I've sort of been jettisoning a lot of that stuff lately."

"Do you remember," she says quietly, "A mission house near Harlem? It must have been many months ago, now." A pause. "It was raining. There were police. You were very frightened." She drops her eyes. "I was very useless," she mutters.

Light-bulb. "You're the nun," I say, rather dimly. "_That _nun. The one who…" My eyes narrow. "I asked you to help me," I say, my voice low. "I asked you for your help and you said no."

"I said I could not," she responds quickly.

"Same difference."

"No."

"Why _didn't_ you help me, then?" Anger is beginning to rise up inside me again; the memory of that night, scabbed over all these months, begins to sting again, to ooze fresh blood. "You saw me. You saw I'd been hurt." I mean the gouge I had on my knee at the time, but for some reason the twin images of Otto and Brenda flash across my mind. "But you did nothing. You did _nothing_." Brenda moves imperceptibly closer towards her. If the nun notices, she doesn't react.

"I did not know you," she says, "And the police were behaving as though you were a criminal."

I snort.

"But," she continues, casting her eyes back down, "I should have defended you until I was sure. Yes. That is what I should have done. I should have tried to find out for myself if…" She shakes her head. "I am very sorry. Very sorry. That is why I came to Ravencroft. I wanted to tell you this. Even if it did not make any difference."

"Uh huh. And do you feel better now, Sister?" I sneer. "Conscience all clear?"

"Well," she snaps, her patience tested beyond breaking point, "You _did_ steal my coat."

This is such a random answer that it almost startles me into laughing. "Oh, right. Which I guess makes us even?"

"I turned away a neighbor in need," she responds, "And you have broken the fifth commandment. Thou Shalt Not Steal."

"Yeah, well, lately, there's been a whole lot of Thou Shalt Nots that I Shalt Done. Did." I wave a hand irritably. "You know what I mean."

"I do," she says gravely. "I have watched you on the news many times. There were many people who held opinions about you. They said that you were a monster. Or a puppet."

"But you didn't think so, huh?" I ask irascibly.

"No, I did not." She pauses. "You always looked to me," she says softly, "As though you were experiencing some kind of private pain. Even when you were laughing and making long speeches and seeming to have fun with what you did. Your eyes did not tell me that you were happy."

"Nobody forced me into anything," I say automatically, and marvel at how quickly the phrase comes to my lips, at how easily I can say something I'm not even really sure is true.

"Then you were happy?" she asks.

"I…" I trail off. "Well, I – it wasn't really a matter of being happy or unhappy, you know?" I finish lamely.

"No, I don't."

"Well, it was more that, uh…" I hiss out a breath and slump back in my seat. "Okay, look, I don't owe you an explanation. I'm sorry, but I don't. And I don't even think I _can_ explain it, anyway, so there's no point in trying."

A silence.

"And, all right, let's say maybe I was in pain some of the time, a lot of the time," I burst out. "It doesn't mean it was all bad. Mostly I didn't feel anything, and that was okay."

"You really think that was 'okay'?" she asks, sounding mildly horrified. "Not to feel anything?"

"It was a hell of a lot better than this," I mumble, wrapping my arms around my knees. "Now I just feel all confused. It was a lot simpler then. People had hurt me, so I hurt them back, and Otto was there, and it was just…" I shake my head. "It was easier to live his way."

My back and head are starting to ache again. It occurs to me that, now, it might just be psychosomatic. I glance at the clock on the dashboard, and it tells me that another hour has nearly elapsed – something I ought to be acutely aware of, but I'm just so tired…

"I would have imagined," says the nun, "That it would be harder to live without feeling, not easier." Pause. "Did you not try to kill your father?"

I exhale, a rush of cold air. "Yeah. Yeah, I did." I look away, out the window. "That'd be another commandment I came pretty close to breaking."

"But did not."

"Not for lack of trying." I laugh bitterly, and stare down at my lap. "It's funny. My dad used to tell me I was worthless, all the time. And I've proven him right, haven't I?"

_What you are is not bad. Not bad at all._

The phrase enters my head immediately, an answer to my question. I don't know where it comes from. Something from a long time ago, maybe. Something from a dream.

"Why are you going back to the city?" asks the nun suddenly.

"I already told you. The hostage thing."

"No. I mean, why are you going there really? What drives you to do this?"

"Because…my guy needs me, I guess."

She looks up at me. "Which guy?"

"I…" I have to stop. I look down at the littered car floor, and up, out the window at the shrubbery and gray sky speeding past. "I don't know," I admit, at last. I sigh, and lie back against the door, arching my neck back and closing my eyes. "God help me," I murmur, "I don't know."

Silence. Then: "Do you want to be with him?"

I open my eyes blearily, stare at the ceiling. Sweet fatigue, slow and thick as honey, is trickling through my bloodstream. "Who?"

"Otto Octavius. Do you want to be with him?"

Otto Octavius.

Otto.

He taught me so much. Put me in touch with a rage I didn't even know I had. Let out all the ugly things I held caged inside me for so long. Lanced the wound. Let the poison flow. I could be wild with him, wild and out there on the razor's edge. I could do things most women don't even dare to dream of doing. He freed me from niceness, from prettiness, from having to grin and bear it all.

He hurt me. He hurt me so badly. Ripped me open. Tore me up until I looked like something he wanted. Something he proclaimed as having value. To him, I _had_ no value until I was his.

He has hurt Peter.

He kills. Without a moment's thought, without regret, he kills. Lives, all lives, are just things that he uses to make a point.

God, the sound it made. The sound. That _snap_. And the way the girl just dropped.

I don't have any response other than a repeat of "I don't know."

Quiet. Then: "A rattlesnake that doesn't bite," she says all of a sudden, "Teaches you nothing."

I turn my head to look at her. "Huh?"

"It is a quote. A writer called Jessamyn West. I learned it when I was first taught to speak English, and I have always liked it."

_A rattlesnake that doesn't bite_…I shake my heavy head. "It's neat, I guess, Sister. But I don't think I get it."

"Sleep," she replies, "And perhaps you will get it later."

She doesn't understand. I can't sleep. I shouldn't sleep. Peter wouldn't sleep at a time like this, not when lives were at risk. He wouldn't sleep if _my _lifewere at risk. And for all I know, this nun might be planning to turn me in at the next gas station. I can't sleep. I can't…

On the road to Arizona, I stayed awake for three days straight. How did I manage that? I try to recall, but it just seems like something that happened once to somebody else. A story I was told. Once upon a time…

The motion of the car is smooth and steady, like waves on the seashore. Bearing me away. _Let me take you away from all this_, says Gwen Stacy. I don't know where that came from, either.

I turn my head to look out through the rear window, at the road that trails along behind us like a silken black cloak. Through half-open eyes, I see faint forms gathering in our wake; all the people that I've been, the ghosts that used to be me, chase behind the car like tumbleweeds in the dust. In the distance, I hear the cry of the hell-hound, and I can't tell if it's behind me or ahead of me.

_Rattlesnake…_

I close my eyes, and try to remember what it feels like to breathe.

****

_Dr. Tate closes the Security Room door quietly, keys jangling in her hand, an irritated scowl on her face. "Couldn't this have waited until tomorrow? I was just about to head home for the day."_

_ The security guard, worried features illuminated by the bank of black-and-white television screens before him, looks at her and shakes his head. "Sorry, Doctor Tate. But I just thought you should know…" He reaches forward and taps one of the screens. Tate peers at it. A storm of gray fuzz. "The camera in Watson's room. It seems to be out."_

_ "So?" Tate's annoyance bleeds through her words. "What do you want me to do about it, for heaven's sake? I'm not an electrician."_

_ "You asked to be kept updated on Watson's condition especially," the guard says, slightly defensively. "But that's not all. Just before the camera blew, she was acting – well, acting a little odd."_

_ A faint stir of interest rises inside the doctor, an interest tinged with a strange foreboding. "How do you mean, 'a little odd'? Patient-in-need-of-more-painkillers odd? Or Cletus Kasady odd?"_

_ The guard shrugs helplessly. "See for yourself." He taps out a sequence on the keyboard in front of him. The feed loops back on itself, resolves into a stark image: a young woman strapped to a bed, writhing and twisting against her ties, eyes rolling back to expose the gleaming whites._

_ Tate frowns. "Huhn," she grunts. "Well, it's nothing I haven't seen before in this place, but still…Bad reaction to the meds, maybe?"_

_ "That's not all, Doc." The guard nods toward the screen. "Just watch."_

_Suddenly, Watson's sweating face changes as she catches sight of something; her gaze is directed towards the doorway, just out of the camera's range. She smiles, says something inaudible on the silent feed; her gaze slowly travels from the doorway, tracks across the floor, and finally comes to rest directly in the camera lens. She utters a brief sentence, and the screen lapses into snow._

_ "What do you make of that?" the guard asks._

_Tate looks startled. She pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose. "What I make of that," she mutters, "Is none too good." A pause. "It looks like she might be hallucinating, but…you know what, I'll go check on her. You come with."_

_ Tate and the guard bustle out of the room, hurry down the corridor, towards Watson's room. The first thing Tate notices, even before her hand closes around the knob, is that the door is unlocked._

_ When she is greeted by the dripping IVs, the smashed camera, the empty bed and the unconscious nurse lying on the floor, Tate swears extraordinarily loudly._

_ "Christ. I should've known." She shakes her head, biting down hard on her thumbnail. "Should've _known._" She swings around to the guard, iron-hued eyes boring into the young man. "Octavius must've engineered this somehow. Gotten a flunky to bust her out or something..."_

_ "Well, at least she can't be that dangerous," volunteers the guard, who has only been working at Ravencroft for four weeks. "I mean, you took out her tentacle thing, right? Without it she's just a normal woman, and pumped up with drugs besides. She won't get far."_

_ Tate barks out a laugh. "There's a hostage crisis in the city, to which this woman – the current poster child for Stockholm Syndrome – is almost certainly heading as we speak. And you're telling me she isn't dangerous?" She shakes her head. "Get the phone. Call the NYPD." She sighs. "And then get me an aspirin."_

****

_The hour's almost up._

_Fifteen minutes, maybe less. Garrett looks helplessly at his watch, checks it against the time displayed on the clock tower – just a little more time, please, just a few more minutes, seconds, even. But the times correlate. Only a few more minutes to go. Octavius still doesn't have Watson. Another kid is going to die._

_ Out of Garrett's sight, Captain Cleeland mutters words into a mobile phone. She pauses, stares straight ahead in abject horror, and shakes her head. "You're kidding me," she mumbles. Pause. "Right. Okay. We'll just have to wing it, then." She shuts off the phone and strides over to Garrett. "Detective?"_

_ He looks up, notes that the captain's face is the color of the sky: chalky white, and clouded over. "Yes, Ma'am?"_

_ "Bad news. No. No, it's…beyond bad." She shakes her head. "I just got a call from Ravencroft. Watson's flown the coop."_

_ Garrett blanches. "What?"_

_"She got out. Don't ask me how, but she got out."_

_"Jesus H. Christ. Don't these Ravencroft idiots know the first thing about –"_

_"Not the time, Detective." The crisp, indifferent tone has returned to Cleeland's voice. "The first thing we've got to do is let Octavius know that his demands are now completely unfeasible."_

_ Garrett eyes her warily. "You really think that'll stop him?"_

_Cleeland sighs and rubs her eyes. "It never has before, has it? But it's about all we've got." She looks up at the sky, glowering. "Particularly since a certain wall-crawler apparently considers this situation unworthy of his attention." She presses the phone into Garrett's hands. "Call Octavius. Tell him."_

_ "Me?!" _

_"Look, you were the head of the Watson task force," Cleeland responds angrily. "Far as I'm concerned, you're also the one who loused it up and got her shot, which directly led us all into this mess. I consider you responsible for her, and I'm betting that Ock does too, all right? So you're making the damn call. And that's an order."_

_ Garrett looks down at the phone and swallows, before allowing one shaking finger to hesitantly dial the number._

_ He is not even permitted the brief respite of a ringing phone in which to compose himself; the phone inside the Academy is halfway through its first ring when there is a click, and then that voice, that low, flat, deadened voice. "Talk to me."_

_ "Octavius? This is Detective Garrett. Maybe you know me. I was heading up the task force – "_

_ "I know you." If it's at all possible, the voice grows even colder. "Your men nearly killed her."_

_ Even though the temperature is dropping, Garrett feels sweat beginning to crawl down the back of his shirt. "I didn't call to talk about that…"_

_ "It's a shame I didn't take over the police precinct where you work, Garrett, instead of this ridiculous little school. I would have taken great pleasure in skinning you alive."_

_ Garrett grinds his teeth. He will _not_ be intimidated by this son of a bitch. Especially not over the damn phone. "Look, there've been some developments. Do you want to hear them or –"_

_ "There will be no negotiations."_

_"I'm not trying to –"_

_ "Nor will any attempts to buy time prove fruitful. The hour is drawing closer, Detective, as I know you know."_

_ "It's _not _an attempt to buy time!" Garrett practically yells. "It's about Mary Jane, Octavius. Something's happened."_

_ There. That did it. Got the bastard's attention, all right. There's an awful silence on the other end. "What?"_

_ Garrett orders himself to calm down. Orders his heart to slow its rhythm. "We were holding her outside of the city. Someplace we – we thought you'd never be able to get to her." _

_ "I see. And where might that be?" Soft. Dangerously soft._

_Garrett closes his eyes in preparation for the onslaught. "The Ravencroft Institute."_

_Another silence. This time, Garrett fancies that it's a shocked one. "You put her…" Octavius says slowly, "In _that place?_ In that…_madhouse?_" His voice shakes with contained, concentrated rage. _

_ "It was only temporary. But, look, she's not _there_ any more," Garrett rushes ahead. "That's the thing. She split, Octopus. Escaped, just within this last hour. We don't know how she did it and we don't know where she is. She could be anywhere. Literally anywhere at all."_

_ Even more silence. Garrett gratefully continues, choosing to take this as a good sign. "So you see, we can't give her back to you. Not even if we wanted to. What you're asking for is completely out of the realm of possibility now. So, please, if you'll just at least give us some time…"_

_ "You," Octavius says coldly, "are a liar." The line clicks and dies._

_Garrett stares at the phone, utterly aghast. The whole situation now is assuming the illogical, unnatural quality of a bad dream. What is this, he wonders, this terrible slipping feeling, this sensation of the ground beneath one's feet crumbling and giving way?_

_ The feeling of time, as it swiftly and implacably runs out. _

****

**Between the terse sentences, I heard him loud and clear. Heard the lie in the detective's voice. The uncertainty. **

** It was all lies, of course. Nothing but lies, designed to destabilise me, buy them more time, throw me off course. Just as what Parker said earlier was clearly a lie. What he said about her not wanting me any more. **

** My face burns, and my hand shakes as I replace the phone in its cradle. A moment passes, and I yank it out of the wall socket with a growl. No more distractions. **

** It had to be a lie. If she really has escaped, really has broken her bonds and is in fact running free and wild even as I formulate these thoughts – **

** Then why isn't she already here?**

**Parker looks up at me from the floor, one eye almost swollen shut, and gives a feeble smile. "Trouble in Paradise, sunshine?" he asks weakly. "Why don'tcha come over here and tell your Uncle Petey all about it?"**

** I ignore him. **

**It could be true. Yes, it very well could be. Ravencroft is some miles out of town; I try to calculate the amount of time it would take her to reach here by an easily-procured car. It is not out of the realm of possibility that she is on her way here right now.**

** Over in the corner, three more flies have joined the first two, hovering over the carrion that used to be Amy Lowell. Their buzzing rattles inside my head, stings behind my eyeballs. Tiny dots of glittering black, they flit past the impassive white face of the wall clock. Ten minutes until the new hour is born, soaked in blood. **

** Mentally, I fast-forward past all of this, skip right to the part I prefer. The part wherein she appears, tired and injured and care-worn but still my Mary Jane, _my _Mary Jane, no other version. And I'll take her back home, to our home, and I will look after her, just as I did when first she came back to me. I'll prepare her food, and bring her magazines to read, and when she's well again, I'll take her for a night out, high above the city, just her and me. No crimes, not just yet. Just the wind combing back our hair, and the gleam of the skyscrapers, and the blind gold eyes of the car headlights below.**

** She always liked that.**

**My breath seems to snag on something sharp on its way out of my lungs. The feeling of eyes upon me; I cast a razor-wire glare across the room, and meet the bleary yet unshakeably calm gaze of Peter Parker. My hands curve into fists, shake even harder; I cross my arms, jam them into the folds of my coat. A sour taste, riding the back of my tongue.**

** Eight minutes.**

**I sweep my searchlight stare across the gaggle of dancers, over greyhound bodies and shiny hair, over pimples and black leotards and haunted eyes. In their midst, seemingly singled out, a girl and a boy. Handsome couple. Schoolyard romance. They seek to form a tiny island in the ocean of trapped humanity, pressing closer together as if for warmth. The girl is shivering; the boy has draped his arms about her, rubs her forearm with a reassuring hand. Oh, yes. He can solve all her problems. He can make the bad man go away.**

** Young and pretty and so very in love. All the qualities they would need to be considered the favorites of Aphrodite. Everything that would qualify them as perfect stage partners, dancing tribute to the goddess as she smiled down on them and showered them with happiness and good fortune.**

** But Aphrodite was a fake. A graven image, designed to bamboozle the gullible populace. A pretty face carved in marble and painted in oils. No real god would ever be so benign, so tame. **

** Real gods, I know, demand sacrifice.**

**I look at the couple, and I look at Parker. He follows my gaze, and for the first time, the faintest streak of doubt, of fear, emerges in the depths of his eyes.**

** "You seem terribly interested, Mr. Parker," I say softly, "In impressing your opinion upon me. Very well, then."**

** Two tentacles unfurl and snatch the two children apart, lifting them away from their shrieking peers and bringing them around in front of me, held steadfastly in place, one tentacle draped around each youth's shoulders, their blank-eyed, sweaty faces turned towards Parker. **

** "Which one of these two young lovers," I ask him, "Would you say deserves to survive the hour?"**

** Parker's eyes open, even the swollen one, as far as it will go. "You can't seriously – Ock, let's just –"**

** "I assure you, I'm perfectly serious. You know these things best, Parker." I feel the venom dripping from my lips, taste it burning the roof of my mouth, the pit of my stomach. The taste is foul, but bitter or sweet, I don't believe it makes a difference any more. "You are, after all, this room's expert on what it means to _love_." I spit the word out, a poison dart. "Make your choice, or I will make it for you."**

** The girl and boy stare at him, too horrified to speak, to move, even to attempt to get away. They glance at each other from the corners of their eyes, and the doubt, the faithlessness, contained within those glances touches some cobwebbed corner of my soul, confirms a despairing belief held in the places inside me that the word 'dark' would not be dark enough to describe: the lie that is love.**

** "Ock – Otto, please," Parker stammers, visibly trying to calm himself, modulate his shaking voice. Sweat slithers down his temple, beads in the corner of his eye, a makeshift tear. "This is all unnecessary, okay? Nobody has to die. Nobody has to –"**

** "Six minutes. Make your choice." I tighten my grip around the couple's shoulders.**

** The girl whimpers. "Please, Mister…" she whispers, though it is impossible to tell whether or not she is speaking to Parker or to me.**

** Parker shakes his head; the sweat flicks from the tip of his dark hair. "Ock, for the love of God, put them down. You're only trying to get to _me_, not to them. Think of what MJ would –"**

** And then the young boy cracks. "Pick _me!" _he screams. "Mr. Parker, pick _me_! Kill her, not me! Don't let me die!"**

** "You _snake_!" the girl screams, overlapping him. "Tim, you bastard! Pick me, Mister!" she cries, swinging to face Parker. "Choose me, not this worthless –"**

** " – Please, choose me, please, oh God, my mom –"**

**" – Pay you, my father's real rich, kill him instead, don't let me – "**

**" – Just kill her, kill her and not me, I can't –"**

** The twin scars, on my body and on my face, are beginning to ache as if laced with sulphur. It makes an interesting contrast with the numbness assailing every other part of me. I smile grimly, barely feeling it. **

** "Young love," I whisper. "How easily it can turn on itself, hm?"**

**Parker just stares, aghast. His body trembles; sweat pools in the hollows of his pallid face. His pupils contract and expand, contract and expand, and I know he is slipping away from here, escaping into the morphine fog.**

** I stretch forward my lower-right-hand tentacle, smack him hard across the face; rubies of blood scatter across his cheek, but he doesn't seem to be fully responding even now. "Five minutes, Mr. Parker," I bark, "Or it's out of your hands."**

** He stares ahead, past me, through me. "Oh no," he mumbles. "Oh please. Go 'way. Go 'way…"**

_She dances, casting no shadow. Her hair, freed from its tight bun, swims in warm brown waves around her softly rounded face, ripe wheat rippling in a breeze. Her feet in their dainty slippers hardly touch the ground, and her childish lips silently chant _one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three_. Keeping time. Time must be kept. Always._

_ Amy Lowell dances through the room, this room sucked dry of all sound, this room suddenly peopled only by statues. Her black leotard gleams in the frosty light sluicing through the windows; her eyes are closed, and Peter has the impression she is humming to herself. _

_ Her bare arms dip gracefully through the tombstone air, and the scarlet veil peels from the palms of her hands as she twirls and curtsies through the room. The red cloth, shiny as satin, cocoons the ballet teacher, her hands at her throat; gently enfolds Skye's waist; an outstretched arm here, a crooked leg there._

_ She whirls up behind Octopus, his face a rigid death-mask; Peter moans another warning, but she seems oblivious. The red veil loops around each tentacle as she spins wildly on the points of her shoes, white shoes, shoes that are themselves blossoming red even as she spins; she whirls around Ock, encircling his legs, his torso, his neck with the red silk web, and she dances in her own blood, dances behind him now; winks at Peter, yes, actually winks at him and winds her arms over Ock's shoulders, presses her splayed fingers to the sides of Ock's face, trailing crimson scars over the dead white skin –_

**Three minutes.**

**"Three minutes," I rasp, tightening my grip around the screaming couple's shoulders. "Three and a half minutes. Choose, Mr. Parker. Choose."**

** And I will do it. I will do it, yes, I will. To silence this arrogant whelp, to ensure that his words never burrow beneath my skin. To prove that my reality is stronger than his. That even my lie is better than his truth.**

** The buzzing of the flies, inside my head. Deafening. That dull and droning chant.**

** The couple continue to plead for their individual lives, at each others' expense. Tearing at each others' flesh.**

** I did not wish for this. To be left all alone, here at the end of the world.**

**I close my eyes. My lips form a silent snarl.**

**I toss the girl and boy aside. They fall to the floor, greedily gulping air into their lungs; they glare at each other, eyes glistening black and wet with hatred.**

** I watch them as they crawl, on hands and knees, back into the protective safety of the herd, as far from one another now as once they were close. The scent of betrayal lies thick upon the stagnant air. Silence, delicate as crystal. The breath of the dancers, slowing with the beat of their hearts, evaporating into clouds of cold air issuing from their lips.**

** "Not…gonna kill them?" Parker asks in a weak voice, blinking rapidly.**

**"Something between them is now dead." I breathe out. "It's enough for me." **

** He gives a soft sigh, and falls onto his side, closing sweat-soaked eyelids. I turn back to him.**

** "You see, then, don't you," I ask softly, "Just how much your love is really worth?"**

** Parker looks up at me, expressionless, then closes his eyes again, as the sound of the girl's sobbing fills the quiet room.**

** Kaminski, comforting her, happens to look up, out the window. "Snowing," she suddenly says. She strokes the girl's hair, directs her to look. "It's snowing," she whispers.**

** I look, as much for an excuse to avoid Parker as out of any genuine curiosity. She is right. The outside world has dissolved into white diamonds, glittering shards of the sky drifting down to cover New York. Heaven is broken, and its shattered remnants will bury us all, if we are lucky.**

**I want sleep, now more than ever.**

**I want a cigarette. **

**I want to bury my face in my hands and never have to meet another's eyes, ever again.**

**I want my mother.**

**I want, I want, I want so many things. I want so much. So much it hurts.**

**It seems there is nothing left to say. Everyone here looks so drained, so empty. Myself included, most likely. **

** I suppose my father would consider me weak for letting those children live, when I swore I would not. Perhaps everyone will consider me weak. Perhaps I am.**

** Will sparing their lives make Mary Jane hate me less?**

**A strange thought. Mary Jane doesn't hate me. She has no reason to hate me. None at all.**

** Why would she hate me?**

**What have I done to make her hate me?**

**What have I -**

**What have I done?**

**My scars. They won't stop. Won't stop hurting me.**

**The snow cascades down the slate-gray skies, erasing the world one white teardrop at a time.**

****

Through the sliver of my eyelids, no color at all.

A vast field of white, shining beyond the smeared glass of the window opposite. Hot, slightly muggy. The nun's switched the heater on. The hem of the nurse's smock has ridden up over my thighs, and the bare flesh sticks to the leather, sucks at it as I shift upright.

A haze of steam obscures the view; I pull the edge of my sleeve over my hand, rub a circle, look out blearily. The skies are vast, hovering over this tiny moving space like angry gray eyes. Fields of white ice spread albino fingers over the earth, making every stretch of land identical to the last. Snowflakes, delicate dancers, whirl and waltz through the frigid air.

I was dreaming. I know I was dreaming, but I can't remember what it was about. I think a red cloth was in there somewhere. My hands, I note, are curled into fists, and judging from the slight throb in my palms from where my nails have carved half-moons, they have been in this position for some time. Ready for a fight.

The metal stitches in my head tingle slightly. My back feels like a sack full of shattered porcelain, crushed vertebrae grinding themselves down into powder.

I look out the window again, struck blind by the dazzling white sameness beyond. "Am I still dreaming?" I ask.

"No," the nun replies. "You are not."

Her voice is authoritative, warm and certain of itself; and I'm about ten, sleepy in the back seat of the family car very early on Christmas morning, before the sky has lightened; Gayle watching the winter sky on my left, scooted as far from me as possible; and Mom in the front, driving through snow and slush and tears to the house of the next relative – the rest turned us down, no room at the Inn.

I hear my echoing voice, saying something about how you can outrun the past if you're fast enough. Wrong, so wrong. The past doesn't run in a straight line; it's liquid, like mercury, shimmering and changing shape. Constantly dripping down into the clear waters of the present, turning them murky, clouded, uncertain.

I press the flat of my hand to the surface of the window. A chill, passing through the pads of my fingertips, tracing the whorls of my fingerprints and the lines mapping my hand – heart line, life line. I imagine them lighting up, illuminated by the cold, like city lights viewed from space.

There was a time – not long ago – when I would have felt nothing at all. When no cold would ever have touched my body, nor any heat; no searing light or whisper of air. No pain.

The icy touch of the window-glass cobwebs through my veins, smooth and cold as silver.

"Get ready," says the nun. "We will be there very soon."

****

The roar of traffic in my ears, screaming car horns, wheels grinding snow into slush, the sarcastic twist of New York voices – we're back. We're home.

I huddle down in the back seat, buried beneath the nun's coat again. I shut my eyes, concentrate on the swerving feeling inside me, underneath me, as the car turns us towards the decision I know I will have to make.

"Damn," I hear the nun mutter.

"What is it?" I whisper.

Her voice is soft and strangled, as if she is talking out of the corner of her mouth. "We are as close now," she says, "As I can possibly get to the ballet school. There is a very big roadblock ahead of us. Policemen are everywhere. There is a huge crowd. I do not know how you can possibly get inside."

I hunch up closer to the left-side door and peek out from under the coat. Through the haze of snow, I see a chaos of glittering red and blue light, yellow police tape, dark blue uniforms directing unruly traffic. The whiteness of the snow makes the police cars parked outside the Academy, just up the street, look lit up with a strange inner glow. Hundreds of New Yorkers, bundled up in mittens and scarves and woollen coats, stand aimlessly around, staring up at the building. Some of them have strained neck cords, look on the verge of screaming; must be the kids' parents. I wonder if Aunt May is here, and scan the crowd for her, but if she's around, then my dulled senses and the steamed-up window shield her from my view.

"I can't get you in any further," says the nun, chewing her lip and watching me in the rear-view mirror. "I am sorry. Perhaps…perhaps it would be best if you simply went to the police officers and - ?"

"Not an option," I say crisply. "I do that, I never get in to see either Peter or Otto. Not until my trial, anyway. And in the meantime a whole bunch of kids wind up dead."

"What is your plan, then?" asks the nun.

I turn back to the window, stare out at the scene. Without requiring a word of command from me, Brenda unwinds herself from the back of the nun's seat, drops down to the floor, and slithers up to me. Absently, I pet her with one hand, winding the window down with the other.

"I think maybe…a distraction," I say slowly.

****

_Garrett blinks the snow from his eyelashes, rubs it from his hair. "Christ," he mutters. A snowstorm. Yeah, that's just great. Just perfect. Because there wasn't enough to deal with right now, the hour just having passed, Watson on the loose, Ock disconnecting the phone, another kid probably lying there dead…And now the weather decides to get in on the action. Apparently, Garrett thinks, even God Himself hates the NYPD._

_ What else, Garrett wonders, can possibly go -?_

_Before the sentence has even finished forming in his brain, Garrett has cause to regret it. _

_ It begins with a scream – from one of the officers, or from a member of the crowd, Garrett will never be sure. There are words in it, but nothing that can be made out, and soon it doesn't matter, because everyone can see._

_ One of the junior officers pulls his gun; two seconds later, it's whacked out of his hands, and five steel claws fix around his skull, slamming him back against the police car, knocking him right out._

_ A snake, Garrett thinks frantically, a huge black snake reared up to strike; but snakes don't have claws, they don't –_

_ It almost seems to hiss. It thrashes around, a dark whip-lash through the pale air, arching and curving, shining beetle-black. It spins on its axis, a whirling dervish, thudding dully against the side of a lieutenant's head, jabbing viciously into a__ sergeant's ribs; the officers crash down to the ground, feet away, skidding in the slush. The crowd, eyes riveted, seems to unleash a collective scream._

_ "The hell is that?" Garrett gasps._

_"Don't care," thunders Cleeland. "Open fire! Take it down!"_

****

_The tentacle, Brenda, has no consciousness of the actual fact of the first bullet hitting; feels no understanding of the pellet of lead embedded in its skin. It is blind, deaf, dumb; does not even possess a consciousness all its own, sharing one instead with its mistress. But it feels the shock, running all the way up and down its slim black body; it feels the shudder, feels the electric crackle, feels a failure deep within its system. _

_ The second bullet follows quickly on its brother's heels, burying itself inside what passes for Brenda's skull. The dark snake's-head cracks, shatters, pieces scattering in the snow. Partially decapitated, the tentacle still writhes, as if in agony, in death throes; whips from side to side in search of solace from a pain it does not feel._

_ The third, fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh bullets sail through the air; and they cut the tentacle, Brenda, into pieces._

****

It's only my imagination, of course. I know that.

Brenda is just a mechanical construct. It – she – it isn't part of my body any more. We aren't connected; my nervous system no longer responds to the tentacle's manipulations, and vice versa.

Yeah, I know all that.

But as I rush up the steps of the Academy, ignored in the commotion, the nun's coat – now mine, I guess – wrapped tightly around me…I still have to close my eyes. Only for a brief second. I still have to consciously close my ears to the boom of the gunshots.

Something inside my mind slackens, relaxes. The fist inside my brain slowly uncurls. I don't have to maintain control over her any more. I won't have to ever again.

The first gift Otto ever gave me. The first abomination Otto ever forced on me. Either way, it was mine.

Brenda. Gone.

And now I've got to do this all alone.

I squeeze through the revolving door, my reflection spinning inside its glass and gold-plate; and a hand, rough-hewn and strong as steel, closes around my shoulder, pulling me back.

My heart dissolves into my bloodstream. I'm a statue. There's nothing I can do now, no way I can move. Some part of me is relieved by that. The decision is out of my hands. This terrible choice, miraculously taken away. So much easier to live by someone else's rule.

The hand spins me around, and I find myself staring at my own reflection, mirrored and doubled in a pair of accusing black eyes, set in a hard, lined face framed by scruffy brown hair. A bushy brown moustache. Tight lips. Rumpled suit. Cop.

My lips part. I don't have any idea what I want to say, if anything. Maybe it's just so that I can breathe more easily.

"Detective Garrett," the cop begins, hesitantly. "Of the NYPD. You are under…"

He stops, shuts his mouth. Lips pursed, he watches me, watches my eyes. Reflected inside his, I am trapped, small, blank-faced. My hands clutch at my coat as if at a security blanket. I may be shaking, though it's hard for me to tell; the world itself feels off-kilter.

The pressure around my shoulder releases. Garrett lets go. He lets me go.

"He's on Level Eighteen," I hear him mutter as he turns away.

I say nothing, give no acknowledgement; there isn't time. I just shove my way through the door, seal myself away from the outside world.

The rubber soles of the nurse's shoes slap quietly against the marble floor of the lobby. The air has that faint mausoleum smell of musty air-conditioning and artificial roses. Now that I'm inside, now that I'm so close and time is most probably of the essence, I feel this need to take it slow, to move as if my most pressing concerns are lighter than air. I stroll through the silent lobby, looking around; I catch my own eye in shining gold and brass reflections, a ghost in the polished white floor. Everything so shiny, buffed to perfection, cold and untouchable, ice formations. Such a pretty building. Only rich kids could possibly afford to set foot in here, normally. I wouldn't even have gotten a look in. Normally.

I sidle up to the elevator doors, sandwiched between two potted palm trees; press a button and watch it light up under my fingertip. A soft, musical note, and the doors slide open.

Breathe in, and let it go. Don't be scared. Don't be scared of him, or of what he's done, or of what you might have to do, or of your not having any idea what that might be.

Just step inside the elevator. Press the number eighteen. Watch the doors close in front of you, a coffin lid sealing itself shut. Lean back. And just close your eyes, and breathe.

****

_Getting so much harder to breathe._

_Every time Peter takes another mouthful of air, his lungs whisper with pain, groaning under his ribcage. Through the waterfall of morphine, he is dimly growing aware of being inside this shattered body, this shell._

_ He rolls his eyes across to the window, watching the light slanting across the floorboards. The snow pelts against the glass, misting it over, sealing them all inside this room, forever. _

_The light simmers into shadow, explodes into unbearable brightness, collapses into darkness again. It's getting harder to maintain control. Harder and harder to navigate this pulsing mind-labyrinth. The sweet oblivion of the drug versus the ice-water shock of the pain._

_ "Not much of a choice, is it?" he says aloud, so faintly he's sure no one heard._

_He's wrong. Kaminski casts a glance over at him, flicks her tongue nervously over her upper lip, and leans towards him. He can see every molecule in her face, every skin cell, clustered together like tiny bricks; see the fibers of the strands of hair that fall into her eyes, hear the ghost of breath in her throat._

_ "Do not give up, please," she whispers. "Keep trying. Talk to him. You were doing well earlier…"_

_ He comprehends her words minutes after she has trailed into silence. "He almost killed those kids 'cause of me."_

_ "If he didn't, that was probably because of you." _

_Peter looks, then, across the room towards the window, where Ock stands, slumped against the white plaster. His posture hunched, a vast, dark scavenger bird, waiting to prey on the dead. Wrapped up inside himself, he seems worlds away; one arm wrapped protectively around his torso, the other crossed upwards, fingers brushing his chin, touching his blank face. As if to make sure he is still there._

_ He stares into the room, but at nothing in the room. If his gaze falls on anything, Peter realises, following Ock's line of vision, then it falls on Amy Lowell's body. _

_ And what thoughts, what inscrutable, stygian thoughts are running through Otto Octavius' broken mind as he looks at her, this girl that he has killed?_

_ Peter hasn't the slightest idea._

****

**The flies sizzle through the air, multiplying, it seems, by the minute – one for each minute that takes us all closer to the next hour, closer to the deadly rapids. The white coat that covers Amy Lowell is almost totally black with flies now, and standing here, leaning against the wall, watery light from the snow-filled windowpane creeping across my face, I could almost fancy that the still figure seems to move.**

** They say that the first time you kill is the most difficult. I don't know if it's true. I can't remember the first time that I killed.**

** It might have been when I first awoke, after the accident, a dark and confused stretch of ancient, dead history. It might have been during my flight from the hospital, broken body half-naked, mind tortured by morphine nightmares. **

** It might have been when my mother collapsed, her vast body suddenly deflating like a balloon, stabbed to death by the violence in my voice. **

** For all it really matters, it might as well have been today, when I held that fragile neck and felt its snap travelling down the length of my tentacle, reverberating throughout my own body.**

** When I did it, I didn't care. I wasn't even thinking about it. It seemed as natural as dressing, eating, breathing. An action I had performed innumerable times before: destruction as a reflex. **

** Now, though. Now.**

**Amy Lowell meant nothing to me. But not so long ago, neither did Mary Jane Watson. In a reversal of fortune – in a reality defined by quantum theory, proposing an infinite number of alternative universes – it could have been Amy whom I plucked from a life of regimented decorativeness, whom I turned into a replica of myself; Mary Jane who would lie there before me now, devoured by insects.**

** The constant buzz, ringing in my ears, swallowing my senses. **

**I've killed people before, of course. Almost a hundred, at last count. What difference should one more make? What difference, ultimately, should thirty-five more make? There is no statute of limitations on such things, no point at which one can stop and say, "There; I have killed enough". No magic number that will grant you absolution. No absolution is possible. Nor, it seems, is being able to stop.**

** Was there any point where I could have stopped? Any point where I could have pulled back? Any point, Mary Jane, where I could have let you go, where I could have given you something more, something better?**

** Spider-Man (ah, the absent Spider-Man; even he, it seems, has grown disgusted with this whole situation) once asked me what kind of a life I could possibly give you. Well, what kind of a life would you call this, Mary Jane? **

** What kind of a life indeed? **

**I shut my eyes, without relaxing my posture; I must give the impression that I am on guard, that I am in control. **

** The buzzing getting louder, louder.**

**Did I hurt you?**

**The question of the inexperienced lover, the nervous fighter.**

**Did I hurt you, Mary Jane? **

**You seemed to enjoy yourself. You seemed to care. Seemed to be set free. But were you really? Or did I merely take you out of your own cage and set you down in mine?**

** I can't have been wrong. I wasn't wrong. **

**God, how many women must I lose before I am allowed to be right? **

**An abrupt silence. I lift my head. **

**"The flies," I say aloud, not meaning to.**

**Parker lifts his bleary-eyed head from the floor, blinks at me in a reptilian fashion. "Whuh?"**

**"The flies. They've stopped," I say. "The buzzing. It's gone."**

**Parker blinks again. "What flies?"**

**"The –" I look over at Amy Lowell. Nothing. White cloth. White ballet shoes. White legs. No flies to be seen. Not one.**

** Behind my glasses, I roll my eyes closed, turn back towards the white windowpane. A chill in the air, from the snowfall. That's what makes me shiver. Nothing more.**

** "Ock," Parker says softly. "Otto. Can't we just call it a day now, huh?"**

**I'd like that, Mr. Parker. Oh, yes, I would dearly love that. I would like nothing more than to go home, crawl into bed and sleep, sleep until the blankets become a chrysalis, sleep until I may emerge from them an entirely new being. **

** Sleep until the pain is gone. Sleep until my scars are nothing but scars.**

**"There's a beast inside me, Mr. Parker," I hear myself saying, from very far away. The snow dances behind the glass, just beyond my reach. **

** "I feel it, this beast, with me always. Moving around, twisting itself in knots underneath my skin. It's a fanged, clawed thing, and its hide is matted with blood. Its eyes shine; it can see in the dark. It sees best in the dark.**

** "It's rabid. Chained up so long that it has gone mad. It howls and gibbers and slobbers, it shrieks into the abyss, long past midnight. It will not be silent. It will not go to sleep. And when there is no one left for it to savage, the beast gnaws on its own flesh, turns in upon itself. **

** "And do you know why this beast howls and bleeds and rages through the long night? Do you know what it is that this beast wants?"**

** My lips stretch, taut and painful, over my teeth.**

**"It wants its Beauty back."**

**We drift into a silence that covers us as totally as the snow. Everyone in the room has heard me, but I scarcely care now, or can remember what it felt like to care. The air outside glitters, winks, dazzles, a bejewelled and miraculous rain that will never touch my skin.**

** Parker giggles to himself, watching me through red-rimmed, intoxicated eyes. A soft, slow, repetitive sound, his laughter. Almost weeping.**

** "Hey, Otto," he says. "Do you – do you want…to hear something funny? Something real funny…" His voice saunters off, drowned in morphine, then fades back in with another giggle, this one more high-pitched, less controlled. "Something real funny. Might make you feel better…"**

** I say nothing. Parker grins fatuously.**

**"Thing is, I'm actually Spider-Man."**

**I turn around. I stare down at him, at this pitiful wreck, this shattered, drooling, giggling pile of human flesh.**

** And I laugh.**

**We laugh together, laugh loud and long, the staccato bursts of it shredding the icy air. I laugh, and the acidity of it tears my throat to ribbons. My eyes sting, and the laughter, endless and tortuous, chokes me, its bitter taste robbing me of breath. **

** Yes. It's all a joke. All of it. None of it has ever, ever, been anything more than a joke. A pathetic middle-aged carnival freak who flounders without a woman. A despairing, patricidal fashion model with a tentacle sticking out of her back. And a stupid, stupid boy, broken beyond repair, play-acting at being Spider-Man.**

** Oh, my God. It's all so hilarious. So meaningless, so horrifically meaningless, and so hilarious.**

** The laughter gagging in my esophagus, I choke out: "I was going to save you until last. I really was."**

** And my tentacles shoot out towards him.**

****

The number eighteen, carved in black, lit up from behind by a sickly yellow light. I stare at it, leaning back against the elevator wall, my arms crossed tightly over my chest. Level Eighteen. Level Eighteen, and Peter, and Otto. In only a matter of minutes, I'll be there, and I wish I could slow time down to a crawl, give myself a few moments' deliverance. Like that would make such a huge difference. Like that would give me the chance to gather up all the little bits and pieces of myself and assemble them into someone strong, someone clear-headed.

Back in the hospital, Peter simplified things, if only for a while. He made me think that the solution was really that easy, that I was all better. He's always done that for me. Always been my placebo.

But things aren't all better. I'm not all better. I don't know if I ever will be.

The weird thing is, though, that I'm kind of okay with that. I don't know if I have the right to be. I've hurt people, so maybe I should completely despise myself, beat myself up night and day, even feel like pulling out a knife or a gun or something and ending it all. But I just don't.

I also don't want to be with Otto.

That's the answer. To the nun's question, the one I couldn't answer earlier. "Do you want to be with him?" she asked me. No, Sister. No, I actually don't. A surprising thought, a scary thought. But true.

It's everything he did to me. Or, more to the point, everything I do to myself when I'm with him. I don't want to live on a rollercoaster any more, not when the lows outnumber the highs. I don't want my pain eating me alive; I don't want a life that began with shining steel, and drugs, and my body cut open on a slab. And ends with a dead teenage girl.

No. I don't want Otto.

But I'm going to stay with him.

What we want and what we deserve are such different things. As I said, I don't despise myself. But I can learn to. Even if I don't believe it myself, I probably deserve all the pain, Otto's particular brand of pain. But those kids don't. Peter doesn't. And he has made bigger sacrifices than this for my sake.

All I have to do is be convincing. Smile. Smile real pretty. Flash. Click. Turn your head Otto's way, MJ. Show him your loyalty. Show him your devotion. Strike your pose, and hold it, hold it, hold it.

Click.

And that will be the end.

A soft 'ping', and the doors slide open.

A long, carpeted hallway, lined by polished oak walls. Gilded double doors at the end. Muffled sounds echoing down the corridor.

Deep breath, MJ.

One foot out of the elevator.

You can handle it.

Both feet on the carpet.

This is doable.

And now I'm walking.

****

_The walls are dissolving. The walls are dissolving under the stunning heat of the flame, the flames belching forth from underneath the floorboards and the screaming students are warping voices warping slaughterhouse cries pigs and cows with slit throats and twisted faces, and twisted, twisted, the steel tentacle around Peter's throat is twisting and the oxygen is a bubble in his brain, a bubble, his head is a bubble and the building is on fire! The building is on fire! Haven't they noticed? _

_The shadows are everywhere, everywhere the fire is not; the room is a black pit,_ _and the angry buzz of the flies grinds through his eardrums, louder even than the squealing abattoir creatures all around. Nothing but darkness, nothing but flame. A girl, her face frozen in a silent scream, wrapped up in a shimmering red veil. Two women, dark and light, their arms around the black creature from whose body the metal arm extends._

I'm in Hell! This is Hell!

_ And then Peter sees it._

_He_ sees _it._

_The beast. _

_Otto Octavius is gone. Even Doctor Octopus is gone. Where his face was is now an expanse of dead white, blood-drained, a negative of a real person. Black maw emitting groans and gasps, snarling and slobbering, and no sound at all reminiscent of a human being. Twin event horizons for eyes, a blackness beyond the night: the blackness of the solar eclipse, burning brightness smothered into unnatural dark. _

_ And in the eyes of the beast, Peter can see the abyss._

****

**The scars are screaming with pain now, set afire, but I barely feel them; my mind is a blank, a perfect blank, the clean black curves of the zero. I mustn't think. Ignore the pain. **

** If there's nothing left…**

**If it's all just a joke…**

**The children all around me; their shrieks fill my head, drowning into the hiss of static electricity that blankets my brain. Or perhaps it's the flies again. It doesn't matter.**

** Parker's eyes fall back into his head, white, ghostly; his face mottles, turns purple, soon blue. **

** I don't even seem to really hate him now.**

**The noise, spiralling, escalating; shut up, all of you, everyone, shut up, the whole world, the fall of snow, the telephones, the flies, the students, be silent, be silent, dear God, give me silence –**

** "Otto! Otto, stop it! I'm _here_!"**

**It stops. **

**All of it stops.**

**Nothing but that clear, ringing cry, piercing the veil of sound.**

**I swallow. Parker ceases to exist; my tentacle relaxes, drops him to the floor. If he makes a sound - a thump as he hits the boards, an incoherent groan - then I don't hear it.**

** I turn, slowly, in the direction of the doors.**

**And there she stands. Framed in the doorway, arms raised, broken-nailed fingertips brushing the curve of her throat. Her flawless skin nicked with a thousand tiny cuts, little red mouths. Snow melting in her oil-slick hair. The blood flushed to her cheeks, to her lips. Her eyes so wide and so green, so endlessly and eternally green. **

** Mary Jane Watson.**

**Wilted.**

**Bruised.**

**Battered.**

**But still Mary Jane Watson.**

**I look at her. She looks at me. **

**She lowers her hands, holds them at her sides, palms turned outward.**

** "I'm here," she repeats calmly.**

**__**

**_Next: The final chapter._**


	11. The Rattlesnake That Bit Me

_**Freak Like Me**_

_by_

_**Santanico**_

_**Eleven: The Rattlesnake That Bit Me**_

So often, the things that the mind forgets, the body remembers.

I'd forgotten the kind of effect that seeing him again, after such a long time, would inevitably have on me. Forgotten how I'd fallen into withdrawal when we were apart. But my body knows. Remembers it, the way it would remember being burned, or being cut, or being electrocuted. Instantaneous reaction. Recoil.

But, my God. He looks so…

**The first thing I notice about her, really notice, after the initial shock has faded, is that she looks…**

…Wrecked. I'm so used to thinking of him as a presence, an all-encompassing, enveloping presence, that it's like I'm only seeing him for the first time. And he's a mess. His hair is oily and unkempt; his skin pasty and sick; his clenched jaw dark with stubble; his hands trembling. His whole being just bleeds desperation. I wonder if this last is a recent development, or if he's actually been that way all along. My body betrays me: I raise my arms a little, instinctively, to hold him in an attitude of comfort; lower them when I remember he doesn't like that; hold them still at my sides when the memory of what he's done returns; dig the nails into my palms to dispel the nausea, as I recollect that I'm supposed to be convincing him how much I still need him.

…**Different. Her tentacle is gone, that much I can see; they took that away, stole it from her. She's wearing a filthy nurse's uniform under a threadbare coat, and her face is drawn. But it's not the way she looks, exactly, it's something…else.**

**And the only thing I can think to say is "There's snow in your hair."**

**She raises a hand, touches it to her bangs. "Oh," she says weakly. "Yeah. Well. Outside, it's all – there's snow, everywhere…"**

"**I know," I say softly.**

**Silence. The students' eyes are clamped onto her, and the only sound is that of her skirt, rustling as she shifts her weight from foot to foot. I catch her eyelids fluttering.**

"**You seem unwell," I say.**

"**Yeah." She sighs, shuts her eyes, and leans her head against the doorframe, hands wrapped around her elbows. "Yeah, I'm, uh. I'm not great." She waves a hand. "Things happened on the way. On the way here." She opens her eyes and offers me a wan smile, and I realise that it is the first time I have seen her smile at me in an entire week. **

**Somehow, it doesn't feel quite as good as I had imagined it would.**

"But it doesn't matter," I say, forcing myself to sound cheerful, party girl to the rescue. "Whatever, right? Few bumps, few bruises. It's only rock and roll."

Otto looks at me, and keeps looking at me, his face serious as a tombstone, and I begin to feel uncomfortable. I have to keep this up. I have to be nice, have to act like everything's cool.

Have to act like I don't see Peter, lying sprawled on the floor at Otto's feet, blood oozing from one nostril, making lost, incoherent mumbling sounds through split lips. Have to act like I don't see the body of that little girl, covered over in a corner. Mustn't tip my hand. Mustn't break the fourth wall.

I'm choosing this life. I'm choosing him. For everyone's sake, I'm choosing him. So that there won't be any more dead little girls, so that there won't be any more burning red marks on Peter's throat. So that real life will never bother me again.

Keeping the smile rigid on my face, I push myself away from the doorframe and walk across to him. His presence seems to wrap itself around my whole body, muffling even the echoes of my footsteps in the silent room, drawing me in like a fish on a line. And every step I take shudders upward through my spine, hurts me badly, but I ignore the pain, keep smiling. Because that's what he wants.

"Gotta say, I really didn't expect this, Otto," I say as I walk up to him, getting closer. I still can't quite look him full in the face, not quite in the eye. Easier to look around the room instead, as if any of this is something I really want to see. "I mean, you know, I've been away before, I've had some pretty big Welcome-Back bashes in my time, but you really went all out for…"

My voice fails, trails off into nothing; I forget my lines, as my gaze falls upon the tiny little covered heap in the corner.

Otto steps quickly in front of it, awkwardly; he must know he can't conceal it from me, but he's willing to try.

He's directly in front of me, only inches away. I can't avoid looking at him any more.

I raise my head, and meet only darkness. Those damn glasses, God, they're worse than looking into his eyes; I look back down, and there's Peter, bleeding and broken. Between his swollen eyelids, two white slits; he makes a croaking sound that might be my name, but I can't say his in reply. I can't say anything to him. Not ever again.

**I thought there would be so many things to say. While she was gone, every possible thing I could ever have said to her flooded my mind, a deluge of words: hate you, need you, kill you, find you, please you, curse you. But now she's here, and now I have nothing to offer her but banalities. "You're hurt," I say, and my voice sounds like rasping sandpaper. She stands so close to me now, so close I could touch her. I see how pale she has become, how the sweat on her forehead has soldered her bangs to her skin; I see rings beneath her eyes, and the thin blue veins of her arms, interrupted by angry red track-marks. **

**She runs her tongue quickly over her upper lip; shrugs. "A bit, yeah. But that doesn't matter." She looks up at me, right into my eyes, and offers me another smile, bright as the sun. "We're back together again, right?" she asks softly. "You and me, us. The whole thing we have going. It's all gonna be good again, right?"**

**But she can't keep her eyes on mine. Can't keep them from trailing across the room, towards the dead girl, towards her mangled husband. And she can't keep me from seeing the way her smile dies, the same way a brilliant firework fades into a cold and unwelcoming winter sky.**

**Behind all of this, behind her jerky movements that struggle to be smooth, behind her faltering smiles and hesitant gaze, lies some truth, a truth that fills me with nameless dread even as I find myself lacking the ability to articulate it. **

**She runs her hands over her upper arms, as though she were cold. She glances back at me, and her gaze catches mine again. She looks momentarily startled, as if she had not expected to find me still watching her, and looks back down. "Listen," she says, her voice low, "Can I…You and me, can we, you know, talk? Someplace – " She shoots an anxious glance at the watching students "- Someplace quiet?"**

He looks at me for a moment, and I think he's going to say no, that there isn't anything to talk about; think he's seen through me, seen past my pretty smile to the part of me that's dying with every fake, lying word. But he doesn't. He nods, and gestures across the room, towards a door leading off the main studio.

I lower my head, like a woman condemned, and walk past him. I brush against his chest, only for a heartbeat and only as lightly as a breath; though his expression never changes, he draws back as though scalded.

I step past Peter, who utters another low moan, but I doubt he really sees or hears me. It takes almost all my strength not to see or hear him. But that's okay. I'm opening the door, moving into the darkened room within; soon there will be nothing but Otto, Otto's shadowlike presence, wrapping around me, engulfing me, swallowing me whole. Soon, I remind myself, I won't have to lie any more. I won't have to behave as though I truly want a life with Otto. Because, soon, a life with Otto will be all that I'll ever know. Soon, there will be no need to pretend, because there will be nothing _but _the pretense; the real me will be submerged somewhere inside his mind, and I'll forget it ever existed at all.

I step inside the room; in the shadows, a dull gleam, a tarnished glimmer, light on water, a beetle's black shell. I move, I blink, and a thousand girls move, a thousand eyes flash open and shut; the entire room is lined, floor to ceiling, with mirrors, interrupted only by a polished barre running across the walls, caging us in. I'm almost positive that I have been here before. Wandering down a hall of mirrors, a familiar presence beside me, strolling towards a fate I never understood. I've been here before, oh, yes; but I can't remember when, or how, or with whom. It doesn't matter, anyway. It's just an echo in my mind, a last note of music from a silver box that's breaking down.

Otto slips into the room, soundless, and closes the door behind me; he seems to flow inside, melting into his fellow shadows. He flips a switch; dim spotlights pierce the darkness, shafts of light that seem to highlight the gloom rather than dispel it.

I take a couple of steps forward, winding a lock of my hair around my finger, like a little girl. I don't need to look at him to know that he's looking at me; I can feel his gaze, closing around me like a fist, with every step I take further into the gloom. A memory bubbles to the surface of my brain; a laugh bolts from my lips.

"God. This is all so…It's just like how I remember it. Sorta."

I walk up to the barre, wrap the palms of my hands around its cold surface, looking down at my feet, avoiding him, avoiding my reflection. "Did I ever tell you, Otto," I say, "That when I was a kid, I used to take ballet classes?"

"**Did you?" I ask. "_Did _you?"**

**I want to know everything about you. Now, as I feel some kind of ending closing in upon me; now, as this terrible feeling of finality draws its noose around my neck, I want to know who you are, who you've been. I didn't before; then, I wanted to erase it all, wipe your past from the face of history. I wanted to _be_ your past, your present, your future. **

**Now, I wish to know that something remains. Something inside you that is not merely a twisted reflection of myself. Now that I feel Time itself rushing past me in great, cold, uncaring waves; now that I feel the sand slipping between my fingers. Now that you seem so distant and so changed. Draw me close to you again, my Mary Jane, my girl. Bridge this gap. Tell me about your ballet classes. Give them to me. Give me your first pet, your first day at school, first ride on a bicycle; give me your first kiss, first love, first time with a man. Make all of these firsts your gifts to me. **

**If I could only be your last, Mary Jane. **

"Mmm hmm," I say, drawing my feet into fifth position; another thing my body recalls, all these silly, tortuous poses. "I mean, it was never gonna be my profession or anything. Like, it wasn't my calling. It was Gayle's, actually. But Mom thought that, if I went along, too, it would help me develop poise. Help me balance myself." I laugh, and hope it sounds light and charming. "Me, I was just in it for the pretty clothes, really. But it made my Mom happy. That was what mattered."

I hold onto the barre with my right hand, raise my left arm over my head as gracefully as I can, shakily drawing myself up _en pointe_. I can do it; I'm sure I can still hold this pose. Just for a few more seconds, just while he's still watching me…

Something twists inside my spine, like a corkscrew; I gasp, and fall clumsily out of position, doubling over. "Oh," I pant, pressing my hands to my back. "Oh, God. That – now _that _was a bad idea. Damn."

Otto watches me from across the room, his arms folded, leaning back against the wall. Nothing moves but his tentacles, writhing slowly, caught in the spotlights and multiplied in the mirrors – a shining sea of mechanical arms. "Don't stop," he says softly. "Keep going."

I shake my head. "I can't. It's hurting me. Have to…have to stop."

He waits, still watching, as I catch my breath and lean back against the barre. Finally, he speaks again: "They changed you," he says quietly.

"Changed me _back_," I correct him, without thinking, and wince as soon as I realise my mistake.

Otto doesn't seem to register it, but, given that he's apparently determined not to show me anything but a poker-face, it's impossible to tell.

Then: "Show it to me."

I open my mouth to say something, God knows what; something like _no_ or _I don't_ _want to_. Something like that. But I close my mouth, and raise my eyes to bore directly into his, before I turn on my heel to face the wall. I gaze into my own eyes, breath misting the glass and echoing in my ears, as I pull the coat off my shoulders, reach around behind me, draw the zipper down. The sound of the metal teeth snapping open sets my own teeth on edge; a bizarre image of myself unzipping my own spine sweeps through my brain.

It occurs to me that it's stupid to turn my back to him as I do this, since the wall is a mirror and Otto can see everything anyway. But I do it nonetheless.

I lower the zip to halfway down my back, and shrug the smock down. The air is cold on my bare skin; even though he's halfway across the room, I'm sure I can feel his breath on the back of my neck.

**She peels it off, this nurse's uniform of indeterminate origin; peels it off, revealing to me that white expanse of flesh, that body I studied, X-rayed, made notes on for days, the body more familiar to me than my own. The downward curve of the neck, strands of black hair falling across it; the shadows of the shoulder-blades; the hollow of the spine – and I wince, actually wince, as the rough white bandages come into view, as I witness for myself the Rorschach-blot of blood that glues them to her back. The color of rust around the edges, grading into a dark starburst of arterial crimson…**

**It's bad, yes. Very bad. But I have to see it all. I have to see the worst there is.**

"**Take them off," I demand flatly, moving in closer.**

**She hesitates, then reaches back again. Her hands shake as she grasps the edges of the gauze, tremble as she begins to unwind it. Unwind yourself for me, Mary Jane. Show me your nakedness. Your every wound. Every wound I caused you. I want to promise you that I will make it better. Even if I know I am a liar.**

**I watch her eyelashes flutter in the mirror, like the wings of a distressed bird. Are you trying not to cry? And, I wonder, is it this, rather than your bare skin, which stirs my desire for you? **

**She looks up, and her reflected eyes sear past my dark lenses and into my heart. No tears – no fear – lurks within them. Nothing does, nothing I recognise. She is shielding herself, as my glasses shield me.**

**An intelligent move, perhaps, Mary Jane. I don't deserve to be let in.**

**But do it anyway. I beg of you. Be vulnerable for me. To me.**

**She stands before me, stripped to the waist, stripped bare. Her back is a riot of angry color – burst steel stitches oozing blood, black and purple bruises, wounds yellowing around the edges and twisting into white scar tissue. No haemorrhaging, as far as I can see. But those scars will be there forever. Nothing can ever remove them. Not even me.**

**I reach up, press my fingertips to the surface of her back. It is like touching a pearl, shrouded in skin. The first time I have ever touched her here with my own hands; here, her back, the site where I first desecrated her beauty. **

"**This is nothing," I say, all business. "They've performed a fairly routine amputation of the artificial limb." Of Brenda, your Brenda, the child I gave you, whom you loved so much. "But it's an easy enough process to reverse. I can fix you."**

**She flinches; I feel it. Only slightly, so slightly that you might not notice it, were you not paying attention to her, to the way her body moves. But I do. And I feel it. **

"**Yeah," she mumbles, "Yeah. That'll be great."**

**And that is when I know, with absolute and total certainty, that she lies.**

**The knowledge tears down the surface of my heart with the surety of a scalpel blade. She lies. To me, of all the people in the world; me, to whom she once swore total and abject felicity; she is lying to me. **

**Parker was right.**

**She no longer wants me.**

**I shut my eyes tightly, as tight as I can.**

**She no longer wants me, and no amount of acting on her behalf or fantasy on mine will make it so. **

**But I won't believe in it. No, this truth is unpalatable. I will not accept it on circumstantial evidence alone. **

**She must tell me. I will believe in nothing, nothing, unless it falls from her lips first.**

**Idly, keeping my shaking muscles firmly under control, I wind the stained bandage around my hands. "Perhaps," I say slowly, "I can give you more than one, this time. More than one tentacle, I mean. Since you did so well with – what was its name?" I enquire.**

"**Brenda," she mutters, still refusing to turn and face me – modesty? Fear? Disgust? I can no longer tell. **

"**Brenda, yes," I agree. My fingers slip over the soiled surface of the dressing; I caress the bloodstain. "You did so well with her, I thought maybe we could see how you went with more than one. I could even give you four, if you'd like."**

"**Maybe, yeah…"**

**I hold her eyes in the mirror. "Just like me."**

**She is silent.**

**I look back down at the bandage. My tentacles delicately pluck it from my hands, holding it between their pincers; I draw back to give them room, or to give myself air, as they deftly wind the bandage back around her torso. I imagine that I feel the warmth radiating from beneath her skin, the light brush of her breast against the tentacle's cold metal, the thud of her heart underneath it.**

"Everything, you know, has changed," he goes on, just when I'm allowing myself to hope that he won't. "And yet is still the same. This could be a marvellous opportunity, you know. A new start for us. A rebirth.

"I can take you home. We can make new lists of things to destroy; create new enemies to fight, new dragons to slay. Would you enjoy that, Mary Jane?"

I grip the barre tightly, so tightly I feel its steel curves imprinting themselves on the palms of my hands. The tentacles daintily tie the ends of the bandage, and pull away from me. They have brushed up against my skin in the course of their task; I see my own sweat glistening on the tips of their claws as I pull up the front of the smock.

"Well?" Otto asks. "Would you?"

Live the part, MJ. Believe in every word you're saying, and it'll come naturally. Don't get nervous. Don't choke. Not now. Not when it counts. Even though he keeps looking at you with his hidden eyes, and even though not one muscle in his face has shifted position since we entered this room, and even though slipping up could mean the end of everything – don't choke.

I take a breath, turn around to face him, still leaning on the barre for a support I really do think I might need. "Sure," I say breezily, tilting my head to one side. "Yeah. Why not?"

But he isn't finished with me. He moves closer, the tentacles drawing him silently past the spotlights, through the dark. "And us," he says quietly, and hidden in the shadows, his voice sounds disembodied. "Our partnership. Together for…_so_ many years to come. Are you glad of that, Mary Jane?"

And he's right in front of me before I even know it, looking down at me; he fills my field of vision. Even if I moved away, I'd never escape him; thousands of duplicates line the mirrored walls, of him, and of me, looking small, looking scared.

"I am," he says. "Very glad."

Tell him you're glad, too, MJ. Tell him.

Damn it!

Aren't you listening to me?

_Tell _him! Or everyone dies!

"I…"

…Can't finish that sentence. Hell, it's all I can do to keep looking into his eyes.

He looks back; and just when the silence reaches breaking point: "And what happened, almost, the other night." Pause. "On the table."

Oh God. Oh, I can't. I can't. I look away, I just have to. It all floods back to me, that sick desperation inside, the hard wood under my back, his weight on top of me. Once I couldn't decide how to feel about this memory; now I don't even get the choice.

"Will we do that, in time, Mary Jane?" Otto asks sharply, coldly, watching me all the while. "Will we share a bed as well as a life? Are we going to make _love_, Mary Jane?"

"I…Well…"

My head swims; maybe this is what vertigo feels like. I can't believe I didn't anticipate this, that he might want this, even though it somehow feels as if he's actually asking me something else, something quite different.

But there's no other option. I've got to go through with it. Hold the pose, MJ. For everything you're worth.

Click.

"I…If that's really what you want, Otto," I say, drawing every word from my mouth slowly, painfully. "If you think…If you think it would help us. Draw us, uh, closer…"

Nothing changes in his face, even now, even after that. I wonder if he'll kiss me; I wonder if I could bear to kiss back. But he doesn't. Instead, he moves away from me, turns his back, moves towards the center of the room.

Oh, lord. Was that the wrong answer? I start to sweat again. Did he want me to say something else? Christ. If only I could just ask him. Just tell me what you want me to say, goddammit. Tell me what you want to hear, and I'll give it to you.

Just don't ask me to _mean_ it.

**So. My destruction of you would seem to be complete, Mary Jane.**

**Is that how afraid you are of me? So afraid that you would even sleep with me. You would let me have whatever I thought I wanted. Have my way with you. In every sense of the phrase.**

**The idea holds a terrible, dark, deviant appeal. To hold you in my sway, so completely and so utterly. To make of you a slave. **

**This urge in me to crush you. The urge of the butterfly collector, to hold down the delicate thing of beauty and drive a spike through its still-beating heart. To preserve it, keep it, forever, even after the heart has stopped beating and the soul long flown.**

**No. No butterfly genuinely wants to be the possession of a collector, no matter how much admiration it would earn in the years to come. It isn't the truth.**

**Oh, Mary Jane, tell me that it is. Why is it that you, a trained actress, fail so spectacularly in the effort to make your lies convincing? Why, even when I want to believe that you belong to me body and soul, that you are the woman who will _not_ go away, will _not_ die or vanish or otherwise leave me alone - why do I still see that anguish in your eyes that tells me, in no uncertain terms, just how undeserving I am? **

**If I want you, and am never to have you, then I am wretched.**

**If I have you, without your wanting me, then I am damned.**

**But what I want, and what you need…impossible to reconcile. **

"**You are certain, then, that you wish to stay with me?"**

"**Yes. I mean, of course, yeah," she says quickly.**

"**Indeed. But let us play a game, Mary Jane," I say, unable to look at her, knowing that to invite this is to invite everything I fear. "Just a meaningless little game. Humor me." At my back, I sense her confusion, that of someone certain that they are being led into a trap. And in a sense, she is.**

"**What – out of sheer curiosity – what would you have said to me had you decided to leave?"**

**In the mirror, I see her shocked expression, swiftly brushed aside by that damnable actor's mask she wears for her own protection. "Well, I didn't need to make any _decision_, Otto. I mean, I belong with you. It was –"**

**I cut her off brutally: "What would you have _said?_" **

**She starts to speak, and falters. "I, uh…"**

**She lapses into silence. Then: "I don't want to play this game. Or any game. I mean, it's pointless, right? I _am _staying, and that's, that's all."**

**A touch of nervous irritability. Tremors in the earth, before the volcano erupts. **

"**What," I repeat, "Would you have said?"**

**She looks up at me; for a crucial instant, the mask slips, and she looks at me through eyes dulled with exhaustion and pain. Her own eyes. "Otto…please. You've _won_, okay? You got what you wanted, you got me. You finally get to win this time. Just be happy with that, okay? Don't make me…"**

"**What. Would you. Have said?"**

**The truth, Mary Jane.**

**The whole truth.**

**And nothing but the truth.**

**So help you, God.**

There's a ringing inside my head, clear as a bell; I'm sure if I closed my eyes for long enough, I'd be able to focus on that ringing to the exclusion of all else, and maybe then I'd be able to figure out just what in the hell I'm supposed to do now.

I don't know what he wants. I don't know what he expects me to be to him. Just when I thought I knew, thought I had a clear picture of him in my head, he shatters the frame, splinters his image into distortion, and I can't tell which part of him I'm supposed to appeal to.

I walk slowly forward, in the opposite direction from where he stands, as if I'm getting ready for a duel. With every step, I feel the shifting plates of ice cracking under my feet; dangerous ground, nowhere to stand safely, nowhere to rely upon. Christ, lying was hard enough; telling the truth and disguising it as one more lie might just be more than I can bear.

I swallow, try to think of it as being like an audition, or a drama-class exercise, or, screw it, _anything_ other than what it really is. "Well," I begin, weaving my fingers together and pressing them to my heart. "Well. Um. I guess I would say…I guess I would say: Otto, I think we shouldn't stay together. Because, ah…"

Damn it, MJ, just tell him straight out. Tell him that you've been tearing off pieces of yourself ever since the two of you first met; tell him that everything's gone too far, that you can't live the way he does any more; tell him that every stupid, submissive lie that you spit out from behind a fake smile takes you further and further away from what you know to be true, and right, and real; and tell him how much you hate him for putting you in the middle of this situation in the first place, and how much you hurt and rage inside because, damn it, you still care, after every hideous thing, you still care, and you don't want to care and you hate him for making you care and –

No, it's not possible. I can't. Can't do that.

Give him something nice, instead. Something civilised, and hesitant, and polite.

"I think we ought to, um, split up. Well, no, not split up, since we're not…I mean, not see each other any more, not be together. Because – because, we're…not good for each other, and I've – you know, I've changed, and, ah…I feel differently, now, than I did. I'm not so angry any more…"

**You're furious, and you know it. You ache to explode, to give your fury voice and see it burn, white-hot, through the atmosphere of this room. To heat the mirrors until they break. **

**But instead, you're still acting. Still holding back.**

**What is it that you don't want me to hear you say? What feelings do you possess that are so taboo that I must not hear them? What sliver of honesty is so sharp, so painful, that I cannot bear to feel it?**

**You no longer want me, and you have good reason not to. But you will not say it.**

"**Not so angry any more, eh?" I ask bitterly. "Then I suppose that means you'll be crawling back, doesn't it?"**

**She looks up, startled. "Crawling back…?"**

"**To _him._ To that creature you call a _husband_." I spit the word out like venom. "You'll walk out of this room, and you'll go to him, and you'll both go home to your cozy little apartment and lick each others' wounds. And you'll go back to your modelling and your joke of an acting career, and nothing that I have done for you, nothing that I have taught you, will matter one bit."**

**Mary Jane blinks, the hurt as visible on her face as a scar. To my surprise, I find that I am trembling with anger; I thrust my hands into my folded arms, the fists clenching and unclenching convulsively. I realise that every word I said, I meant.**

**The hurt in her features slowly coalesces into a frown. Her jaw clenches tightly. "You really think all that's true?"**

"**I have no reason to doubt it," I say, and fail to keep the snarl from beneath the surface of my voice. "You do realise, of course, that everything you are today is due to my efforts, and my efforts alone? But by all means, Mary Jane, walk away. Walk away from me, and drop, helpless as the puppet you are, the second your strings are cut. Watch as your life fades back into the shiny, soulless, plastic daydream it once was; cater to the lusts and passing whims of the society that you will forget once rejected you –"**

"**Wait a minute –"**

**I can't stop; it pours from me, a deluge of poisonous invective, delivered in tones of ice; a flood of words I didn't even realise I was waiting for the chance to unleash. " – And your husband, oh, yes, your husband; he who defines you, gives you your identity, is the clay from which you mold your entire world. Let's not forget him. How long have you been waiting, Mary Jane, to run back to him, shrieking timorously away from the horrors of reality –"**

" – **The _hell _would you know about reality?" she says, deadly quiet – **

" – **To be his prize once again, his toy, his pretty little doll, the trophy he trots out to show off to his friends – you _would_ rather belong to him than to me, correct?"**

"**No, not correct." Her eyes narrow. "Not in the slightest _bit _correct, actually."**

**I turn away. "Apparently my experiment was a total failure," I throw over my shoulder, making a gesture of futility. "A write-off in every sense. You were scarcely worthy of my time at all, really. I don't know why I bothered."**

He doesn't know why he bothered.

He doesn't know. He doesn't know…_anything._

He doesn't know how much he's hurt me. What he's done to me. What he does to people, what he did to that little girl and to Peter and to countless others.

Maybe I ought to feel sorry for him. Feel sorry for the sort of decaying mind and eroded soul that can't conceive of the damage it does; that can't even begin to comprehend that people – that _I_, goddamn it, that _I _am more than some experiment, a pastime, something to while away the hours. An object. Of beauty, of scientific curiosity, whatever. Some pretty little store-dummy ruled by whatever he says, or whatever society says – never, oh God, perish the thought, _never_ by what I need, by what I want.

"I'm better than that," I say out loud. "I know I'm better than that. And you know it, too."

Otto spins around, folding his arms tightly across his chest. "Oh, yes?" he asks skeptically, advancing towards me. I stand my ground, my arms pressed to my sides. "And I suppose you also know better than I just what is best for you? You think you know what you want, is that it?"

"That's right." The first time I've ever said it with any certainty. And the certainty I feel now is all the certainty in the world. I feel it as surely as I feel the blood pounding behind my eyes, as I feel something hot and dark seeping into my veins like a second dose of painkillers. I no longer remember that this is supposed to be an act. I no longer remember that, afterwards, I'll be leaving with him, no matter what. "I know what I want."

"As do I," he says viciously. "As I should have, all along. You want him. All you want out of life is Peter Parker. That's the truth, isn't it, Mary Jane? A slave you were, and a slave you shall remain."

Some spark ignites inside my brain, some spark of white fire; it travels down my tense, tightened muscles, down my arms, into my fingers, pulling them into fists. Anger, that most familiar of feelings; for the last few months, I wore it, tight and snug against my body as a suit of armor. But to feel it towards _him_, towards Otto, he who was once my whole universe; to know without doubt, for the very first time, that I am right and he is wrong – this is new. This is alien territory.

My breath is coming short and shallow. I draw in air through my nose, swallow it down into my lungs. "You have no right to say any of this," I say, trying to keep my voice level, trying to remember how easily he could kill me, and finding that I don't really care. "You, of all the people in the world, have no right to tell me how to think or feel. Not after everything you've done –"

- _Steel, and blood, blood through a morphine haze, white mask, something squirming and black _–

" – To me. After how…" I breathe in sharply. "…You hurt me."

There. It's out there; it's finally, finally been said. And his expression never changes. Not even a little. The sheer selfishness of the man; he's not even willing to surrender a clue as to how he feels, how any of this affects him. If it even does.

Finally: "I hurt you." I can't tell if it's a question or a statement.

I look down. "Yes." Suddenly conscious of a strand of hair falling into my eyes, I brush it slowly back behind one ear. I see myself reflected in the floor, forehead puckered, eyes red-rimmed and blazing in a white face.

"Badly," I say, more loudly than I probably need to.

Otto doesn't say anything for a while. Then: "You belong with me."

I look up, my anger spiking. "Belong with you, or to you?"

He waves a hand irritably. "What's the difference, Mary Jane?"

That's all it takes. All it takes to set off the powder keg inside me; for the words to burst out of me and all rational thought to melt down. "It's all the difference in the goddamn _world!_" I scream. "I _don't _belong to you, I'm _not_ your girl, and you know what, I'm not Peter's girl either. I _never_ was!

"I am so sick – _so_ _sick_ – of constantly having to be somebody else's girl, okay? I don't want to be your girl. I don't want to be _Peter's_ girl! I want to be _my _girl! _Mine!"_ I slam my fist hard against my chest. "And nobody else's, nobody…"

My voice cracks. My head, suddenly heavy, falls, and I find myself staring at my trembling fist, still pressed against my heart. I'm tired, and every part of me hurts, and I just can't _do_ this any more. "…Nobody else's," I whisper, as the breath shudders out of me.

Otto hasn't moved. He stands there still, watching me, as he always has, all along. I can't bear to look at him.

It's all wrong. Every bit of it. Everything I tried so damn hard to make right. I was good, and I failed at that. I was bad, and I failed at that, too. And the end result is just so…pathetic. A kid dies, and Peter gets beaten up, and I rant and rage and shriek my independence, and none of it makes any difference, because Otto's already won. That's why he isn't reacting to anything I do or say. It'd be like reacting to a malfunctioning clockwork doll. Just a waste of emotion, really.

"Oh, to hell with it," I say wearily. I push off from the barre, slowly drag my feet across the floor, towards the door. "Forget it, Otto. Forget all of it, right? Game over. Let's go home."

As I reach for the doorknob, he says it. So quietly I might never even have heard it. "I'm sorry."

I let my arm fall, and turn around. He stands, statue-like, in the middle of the floor, not looking at me, or at his reflection, or, it seems, at anything.

"What?" I ask flatly.

"For what I did," he continues, and the words sound wrong, awkward and stilted, in his mouth. "Have done. It was wrong. I think I…I believe I may owe you that. An apology."

I walk forward; the sound of my shoes against the mirrored tile beats in exactly the same rhythm as my blood in my ears.

I stop right in front of him, and stare directly into the opaque surface of his glasses.

You're sorry. After everything that's happened…

After everything you've done…

You say you're sorry.

I draw back my hand, and I deal him a ringing slap, right across the face.

**Physically, I am far stronger than she. It isn't the force of the blow that makes me reel back. Nor is it the stinging pain. It's the shock, the sheer surprise of it. **

"**You hit me," I say.**

**Apologising at all was difficult enough, forcing the words "I'm sorry" through vocal cords unused to them. I don't know what I expected her reaction to be. Part of me had hoped that it would make her run to me, take me in her arms, promise never to leave. That it would make everything all right.**

**Part of me, though, expected it. Expected it, and welcomes it. **

**However, anger, my automatic default, has already been triggered inside me; I press a hand to my face, feeling my teeth draw back in a growl. "You_ hit_ me, Mary Jane."**

"**Yeah." Her voice is choked; I look closely through the dim light, and see that tears are coursing down her cheeks. "I did. What're you gonna _do _about it, huh? Kill me? Like you killed that girl?"**

**Involuntarily, I flinch. I look down, away from her burning eyes, twin accusations. That girl. Amy Lowell. Devoured by flies. The young life I extinguished. Who could so easily have been you instead, Mary Jane. **

"**I did that," I say, my voice low, "For you."**

"**Yeah. Funny how all the things you do for me are things I never asked for."**

**Silence descends, uninterrupted save for the sound of her breathing as it slows. The air between us is heavy with words, the lingering afterimages of the words we have hurled at one another, and behind those, the fading echoes of words we once said, long ago. Or should have said, and didn't, and left it too late. **

**The smell of flowers is thick in the charged atmosphere, insinuates its way inside my head. The smell of her; that sweet and mysterious scent that no perfume on earth could replicate. **

"**You regret it, then?" I ask softly. "All of it?"**

**Mary Jane is taking slow, deep breaths in; when they leave her body, she shivers, as though the surrender of them leaves her body cold. She wraps her arms tightly around herself, containing herself.**

"**I did not realise you hated me so much," I say. **

**A pause.**

"**But it isn't any more than I deserve, really."**

**A long silence, before she speaks.**

"**Hate you?" she says quietly. "No, Otto. I can't do that." She swallows, and stares at the floor. On the top of her lowered head, I can see the blood-red of her hair, vein-like roots snaking through the artificial black. **

"**I should," she says, "I kind of wish I could. And maybe some day I will…but I don't now. I can't hate you, Otto. You're the…"**

**Her voice drops to a whisper; she speaks only to herself now, not to me, not any more. "…You're the rattlesnake that bit me."**

I don't know if he realises this – don't know if he even feels it – but I hit him hard enough to draw blood. There it hangs, at the corner of his lower lip: a single dark bead, a lipstick trace from a vampire's kiss. At any moment, it could fall to earth, blurring the mirror-images beneath our feet.

He walks across to me, and places both hands on the sides of my face – only the palms, the fingers splayed, brushing through my hair. "Look at me," he says, voice low. "Look me in the eye and tell me that I am not what you want."

I tear my eyes from my reflection on the floor, and draw them up, slowly, over the great shining black mass of him, past the undulating tentacles, and into his face, whiter even than normal; into the dark recesses of his eyes, the glasses seeming as transparent now as water.

"You're not what I want," I say softly.

His arms fall to his sides. He draws back, breathing in deeply, crossing his arms, looking as though I've hit him again.

"So that's it, then," he mutters. "This is how it ends. This is how _we _end."

He is still; then, in a burst of motion, his tentacles lash out, crack uselessly against the walls. The mirrors splinter into cobwebs.

"It's not – " he rages, then cuts himself off, the unspoken word, "fair", hanging between us.

"It never is," I say quietly. "Someone always has to lose something."

"But why does it have to be _me?"_ Otto demands, spinning to face me. "Why is it always _me?_"

"Because…you keep getting it wrong."

Silence. I stare at the walls, into the spirals of shattered glass. Peter once told me that mirrors were made by heating up water and sand to white-hot temperatures, creating enough pressure to transform them into reflective surfaces. That stuck with me for quite a while: two rough elements, dragged from the dark sea depths, united in fire and turned into something that shows us ourselves, if we can bear to look.

I only just remembered that. It still seems as beautiful to me now as it did then.

**I gaze upon her. It occurs to me that I have always been gazing upon her like this, from across a darkened room, uncertain which version of her I prefer: the real one, the one that lives and feels and whom I know I have hurt; or the one whose lovely image is reflected back at me in a mirror; a mirror that shows me only her, never changing, always what I want her to be, but never shows me myself. **

**I should have known. Should have realised. It was always only one choice: either accept every version of her, or be left with none at all. **

"**I could kill you, you know," I say quietly. One of my tentacles unfurls, slithers across the room like a sea snake, and gently, loosely, entwines itself around her throat. "So no one else could ever have you. You _know_ that."**

**Mary Jane looks back at me through lowered lids, her aspect calm and serene as a Buddhist idol. "Yes. I know that."**

**She closes her eyes, and leans back into the tentacle's grasp. **

"**But you won't," she says.**

**Her form, so small at the end of my arm, her skin luminous in the darkness. A fallen star. Purple smudges beneath her eyes; so tired, she looks so tired.**

**All the books I read as a child, all those tattered tomes of myth and legend, of gods and magic and blood spilled in glorious combat: none of them ever tell you what happened to the Bacchae after the madness was over. They never tell you what became of those women, what they felt after their god had abandoned them. Did they weep for the lives they destroyed, for the children and lovers they tore apart in their frenzy? Did they fall into black despair, knowing that they would never again be able to act with such freedom, such selfish and hateful and destructive freedom, ever again? **

**Or did they just leave? Did they quietly and compassionately turn their backs on that chaotic world, that insane god, and go back to their own lives?**

…**And I see us, she and I, _our_ life together – not lives, for there would be nothing left of us as real people, only as a fantastic two-headed beast, a monster of fiction.**

**I see us awakening to the tinny sound of rain, eyes opening listlessly to another gray morning.**

**I see us sitting at the table, eating slowly, not looking at each other, not speaking. **

**I see us watching television together, on the couch; news reports, sometimes about ourselves, that elicit as little reaction as the reports about people we do not know.**

**I see us committing crime after crime after crime, a never-ending monotony of** **meaningless thefts, the spoils of which we care so little about that we lose them, under the floorboards, behind the sofa, and can no longer remember what they were or why we stole them.**

**I see us having sex. I can't call it making love, because it isn't. Eventually, after boredom and despair has eradicated awkwardness, we'll have sex, and she will watch me through eyes so deadened they cannot even muster contempt.**

**I see us fighting. Arguing, over little things, stupid things. We will fight for the same reasons that we will sleep together: because it relieves the staleness, the lifelessness, the loneliness. Because, for a brief time, it makes us feel something for one another, even if that something is only bitterness and resentment. We will fight each other with robotic, mechanical predictability. We will fight each other because we lack the courage to fight ourselves.**

**And so it will go, on and on. And the poison will seep inside, into the underground reaches of our hearts, but we will be too numb to feel it as it clutches at our souls.**

**We will become our parents. **

**There is no place in the world for Dionysus any more. No one believes in him; he has faded into the mud and dead leaves and tangled, twisted roots of history.**

**But the Bacchae survived. They survived. Without him.**

**Exactly as they should.**

I feel the pressure around my neck slacken. I open my eyes in time to see the cold metal arm unwind itself from me, pull away, return to where he stands, unmoving, only a silhouette now.

He looks me in the eye, and holds out a hand. "Come here," he says softly.

I can't feel myself moving, but I know that I am. I can hear my footsteps. I can hear my blood. I can taste my heart.

It's as sweet as flower petals.

**She stops in front of me, only breaths away. Gently, she touches one hand to the scar on my cheek. The other winds around my waist, as if she's about to dance with me, dip me, sway me; she touches, through the thick leather hide, my bullet scar. She breathes out softly, turns her head; through the forest of black hair, I catch the metallic glint of stitches. **

**What we've done to ourselves. What we've done to each other.**

**She stands, touching me, and I stand, not touching her. She holds all the power. I am undone. There is nothing left to do, nothing left to say.**

**She looks into my eyes, hers like beams of green light, witch-light, boring into me, rendering me open, and bare, and empty. Searchlight beams, seeking out the frightened fugitive, trying to hide in the dark.**

**Her hands still pressed to my scars, she leans forward, and she kisses me.**

**Soft as a falling teardrop. Not like before, no urgency in it, no desperation, no unhappiness. No bitterness in the aftertaste. Not in this, the very last kiss. **

**A kiss to break the spell, lift the curse, wake the sleeping princess. **

**Every fairy tale must end with a kiss.**

His lips taste of salt water. Octopus. Monster of the deep. I taste the bead of blood on his mouth, draw it into mine, swallow it down: I have you inside me now, Otto. For the rest of my life.

If I never break this kiss, we never break apart. We never break.

We would live inside each others' dreams.

But I live in the real world now. Bright and loud and teeming with, oh, so many human lives. With all of its pain and all of its disappointment, it is still beautiful. And never more so than now, right now.

I pull my mouth away from his; we rest our foreheads together, breath fluttering across each others' faces. I catch a gleam, a glimmer of something wet.

"Are you crying?" I ask.

He almost seems to smile. "No," he whispers. "Of course not, Mary Jane. Just a trick of the light, that's all. You know how mirrors…can lie sometimes."

A pause. The kind of pause in which worlds are born, in which old lives die. Then:

"Go," he says to me. "Go. And don't you dare look back."

Slowly, I draw back from him. I look upon him with eyes that know they never will again, not in the way they once did, not in the way they do now. I see his face, the color of the snow outside, etched into the dark in sharp profile; the shining black streams of his hair; his body, held so tightly in its leather casing, as though, without it, he would fall to pieces.

I see him, for this one last time; and I turn my back, and start towards the door.

"Mary Jane?" I hear him ask, tentatively, his voice emerging from the room behind me, from a present that is already becoming the past, so quickly I hardly have time to breathe.

I stop, but I don't turn.

"Not all of it was fake, was it?"

I stare at the bronze doorknob, at the black keyhole, the edges of the door.

"No," I finally reply. "Not all of it was fake."

Tears threaten to sting my eyes, but I won't be crying any more. I grasp hold of the knob, twist it, and pull the door open.

The light pours in, bright and harsh and unforgiving. I blink, squinting my eyes against its onslaught. I had forgotten it was still daylight outside. Forgotten that there was anything other than that room, anything other than that darkness I left at my back.

I thought the light would kill me, once. Thought it would blind me, sear into my fragile flesh, melt me down to nothing. Underneath these chemical dyes, after all, I _am _still a redhead. And you know us redheads. How easily we burn.

But I don't. I don't burn up. And I don't melt, and I don't go blind, and I don't die. My body aches, make no mistake about that; I hurt, on the surface of my body and deeper inside my skin. And some of these hurts, I know, may never entirely heal.

But I don't die.

Despite all of it. Despite the exhaustion. Despite the pain.

Despite everything else, I live on.


	12. Epilogue: Every Time It Rains

_**Freak Like Me**_

By

_**Santanico**_

_**Epilogue: Every Time It Rains**_

**In the end, it was your beauty that saved you.**

**On the witness stand, before the judge and the jury and whatever god could be said to watch over us all, you told them what had happened. You told them of your despair, of your rage, of the madness in your soul you could not contain; you told them that I was your partner, not your captor. You promised me, once, that you would not blame me for anything if you were caught. You kept your word, and, though I know you did it for responsibility's sake and not for mine, I thank you.**

**But it was something I could not allow. Though they tried us separately, your testimony was read back to me; I promptly proceeded to contradict almost everything you had told them. I lied. I told them that I had brainwashed you, that I had coerced and blackmailed you, that your words were nothing more than the product of a mind I had wilfully and purposefully twisted into abject submission. **

**They believed me, of course. Why shouldn't they? I am, after all, a supervillain. It is hardly outside my nature to create and to act upon such an outlandish scheme; on the contrary, compared to some of my earlier ventures, this one must have seemed positively subdued.**

**Besides – and I do believe this may have been the deciding factor – you were, and are, beautiful. I am positive you took their breath away, these plain and dowdy people of the jury, as you stepped into the courtroom, dressed in sober black, or navy, or whatever drab color your counsel, the estimable Mr. Murdock, surely advised you to wear for the occasion. Though I was not there, I know you brought with you into that courtroom a taste of strange magic, of the same glamor I too was once drawn towards, that glamor I felt the need to destroy. **

**So it was that your beauty, and my lies, saved you. I awaited the news of your verdict, pacing the four tight corners of my cell in a state of awareness heightened by anxiety; when informed that you had been acquitted, I accepted the news with quiet relief. It was no more than I had expected, but I was grateful for it nevertheless. Ultimately, the only thing I could give you, Mary Jane, was your freedom. **

**One of the terms of your release was that you were never again to have contact with me, for the rest of your life. So you will never hear these words; you will never hear the last things I mean to say to you in this lifetime.**

**I sit, now, on the edge of a cold steel cot, shrouded by the kind of shadows you can only find in prison: thick and dull and heavy, almost as solid as the brick walls that surround me. Somewhere, far away, I hear the ceaseless drip of water. Someone, somewhere, cries out - perhaps in pain, or perhaps simply to be heard. The smell of dank and mildew, and the cool air of midnight, drifting through the iron bars of the small window beside my bed.**

**Already, the pain is fading, and with it the details. A memory is all that remains of what we once were; here in the dark prison night, it is as distant and dead as a star. And it is entirely possible, Mary Jane, that in time I will forget it, and you, entirely. Some day, the picture of you I hold in my mind, the living, breathing image, may harden, turn to stone, and crumble away completely. Some day, you may join all the other women to whom I gave a part of my life, lost and irretrievable, even to recollection.**

**But I don't think so.**

**Because, outside the prison walls, it is beginning to rain again. And every time it rains, I feel the weight of your arms, wrapped around my neck, and your heart beating its steady, unerring rhythm against my back. Every time it rains, I hear your laughter, somewhere beyond the relentless beating of the drops on the roof. Every time it rains, I see your shadow, dappled and wavering and elusive, flickering across the concrete ceiling.**

**I don't know where you are now. Chances are I will never know. Perhaps you are across the sea, across the world, wandering the sunlit streets of an exotic bazaar, a glittering sarong tied around your waist, seashells woven into your crimson hair. Perhaps you are sitting on a couch in New York, in an oversized T-shirt, one leg tucked underneath you, sipping tea as you idly watch a late film on television. Perhaps you are even in bed, asleep, beside your husband, his bandaged arms positioned around you awkwardly, your legs entangled with his, your hair flowing over his face.**

**I doubt it, though. **

**When I see you, Mary Jane, I see you alone. I see you seated on a cushion, in a dark living room, next to an open window. Below you, a sea of traffic snakes across the city, a vast neon reptile, growling and snarling; but up here, on high, all is silent. Nothing speaks but the wind, whispering soft storm-warnings in your ear.**

**You watch through eyes slightly narrowed, your knees pulled up to your chest, tilted head resting upon folded arms. You watch the sky as lightning jigsaws across the black clouds, throwing the stars into disarray, casting your face in pale relief. Occasionally, your hand strays behind your back; you slowly run your fingertips along your spine, over the rough ridges of scar tissue you know are there to stay. You shiver, as the rain begins to fall.**

**That is when I feel you near again. When I feel your head upon my shoulder and the light touch of your hair, tickling the curve of my neck. When the delicate scent of phantom flowers comes drifting down the darkened halls, filling my cell, trickling down my throat like honeysuckle. **

**I know, now, what Beauty is. I know, because, for such a brief time, it was in front of me, and I saw it for myself. It was never in your eyes, Mary Jane, or in your skin, or your hair. It was never in your body, or your face. **

**The beauty, the real beauty, was in the stars, those stars we watched from the shingled rooftop of my childhood home. And it was in our shared knowledge of their secret names.**

**It is there now, as, together, we gaze beyond the window, and we watch as the ghosts of everyone we have ever known, ever hated and loved in equal measure, ourselves included, gather in the stardust-scattered emptiness that lies between the raindrops. And they join, these ghosts, and they dance, whirling and spinning and laughing, down the corridors of Time. Forever.**

**Every time it rains, Mary Jane. Every time it rains.**

_**THE END**_


End file.
